Take Jessica Miller for example. When I first hired her after she’d just graduated with an Art History degree from Pratt Institute and just a few gallery assistantships under her belt, she treated me with the proper respect that I deserve. I am not some midwestern housewife. But I could have been if I went with the flow in my own life, and fulfilled the expectations placed on me. Instead, I was the first woman artist to represent the U.S. at the Bienal de São Paulo. Last year, I was selected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I got some award (I don’t remember the name of) for art from the Austrian government, and my Zara graphic tee line sold out almost immediately. You think any of this was easy? I had to claw and fight my way up to where I am, and to stay as successful as I am for forty years? I think about these studio assistants - just because I am giving you a paycheck, don’t act like I’m just your boss at some bank where you’re a teller. I am still Nancy Gallison, the one and only. Williamsburg hipsters have my artwork on their tote bags. Walk up to any “Feminists Artists” book in the bookstore and flip through it, I will be featured front and center, alphabetically between Louise Bourgeois and Frida Kahlo.
Anyways, back to Jessica. She had sterling references from her little gallery stints. When I first met her, she seemed nervous to the degree that it conveyed that she took the job seriously enough, and she knew who I was. She seemed unsure about taking the job to work at my artist studio. I have to admit that I don’t have the best reputation in how I treat my staff. But we did a little recognizance and found out what she was making at the Gagosian, and just offered her double the money. That was that. Funny how the work/life balance concerns of applicants just disperse into the ether when the right number is typed into an offer letter.
At first, I enjoyed experiencing my world through the expressions on her face: her shock the first time Jay-Z walked in when we were planning for building an art institute with him in the little town of Hudson, New York; her excitement the first time I took her in a helicopter so that we could meet a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet on a remote Bahamian island so that he could collaborate with me on a project set to adorn the lobby of a skyscraper in Sydney, Australia; her surprise when we had a working lunch at Balthazar and I order Château Rayas from 2011 with my New York strip au poivre. Well, she was clearly floored both at the price of the wine on the menu and the symphony of flavors she appeared to experience when she raised the glass to her lips.
I loved that it felt like we were in it together. I sent her to art auctions to bid on works for my personal collection, and having her in the rooms while she was texting and calling me about updates: “The Kiki Smith is up to $13K do you want me to bid more?” “Are you comfortable going past $60K for the Sol LeWitt drawing? Maybe a little bit past?” “Ah, we won!” “WE WON!” That part was a race, a sport, and I loved having her as my teammate.
As far as negotiating on contracts for projects went, she needed some guidance. I taught her and she was an open, moldable apprentice: it is okay for people to think you’re a bitch. They don’t want to give women what they are owed, what they deserve, no matter what. So, if you ask for anything directly they call you a bitch? That’s just the patriarchy. Be a bitch. Call me Nancy Gallison, a proud bitch whose Zara line sells out immediately then. What’s the alternative? We sit in a house and wait until our husbands come home and ask for their pipe, robe, martini, and sauteed chicken breast with broccoli and rice pilaf at precisely six each evening? I am not going to feel guilty one bit for choosing a different path for myself.
She did well. If someone said no, she learned quickly: offer them double the money, call them repeatedly, say things like “this is not acceptable to us” or “we will report you to the Better Business Bureau”. She mostly got what I wanted. I did notice that her outfits changed too. When I hired her, she wore cheap polyester tunic-type dresses, leggings, and fluffy floral scarves. She didn’t stand up straight. She wrote emails with many questions marks and too many exclamations. She said words like “dude” and “like” more than was palatable.
Under my tutelage, she started carrying her laptop and tablet everywhere in a Kate Spade slipcase, she traded in those Forever Fifteen, or whatever that God-awful clothing store is called, dresses for probably Calvin Klein fitted, boldly hued, monochrome sheath dresses. She insisted on booking only hotels that offered room service in the far-flung European cities I required her to work in (perhaps I could have given her more advance notice on those trips), and started to refuse any travel booking that was anything below business class. She became actual friends with the art preparators from Art Basel, and kept texting them long after we returned from Switzerland. She had a favorite back-alley ramen cafe in Tokyo. I made her a cosmopolitan person. I became proud of her.
Maybe I went too far sometimes though. It was just that out of everyone who worked for me, I knew that she would do whatever task it was correctly. Maybe I emailed her after midnight a few too many times expecting an immediate response. I had her work on a project in Riyadh on Thanksgiving. Obviously, the gallery workers in Saudi Arabia were not aware of American Thanksgiving, and I lost track of the calendar. I only realized it afterwards when I heard her in the hallway outside our Brooklyn office begging her mother for forgiveness, in some place like Kentucky or Ohio or whatever backwater swamp she had originally crawled out of before I taught her all the wonders of the greater civilization.
There were moments when Jessica seemed burned out, like I was asking for too much. I overheard her complaining to another assistant in line at the bustling deli down the street from our DUMBO office that it was obnoxious I only type emails with caps lock on. I found that complaining annoying because everyone knows that is a trademark stylistic choice of mine. But I knew how to handle people. It wasn’t anything an unexpected five-thousand-dollar Christmas bonus, or a-not-previously-discussed ten-thousand-dollar raise couldn’t solve. Whatever the problem had been, after throwing a stack of cash her way she’d show up the following Monday morning, with her passport handy in her purse, just like new.
I didn’t realize that it was her wedding anniversary when we were working at a gallery in southwest England. We were having lunch outside in a beautiful garden among the lilies and dragonflies when she left her cellphone face up while she went to the bathroom. I was distracted by a ladybug meandering across the surface of it when I saw a text come through. “Steve” said “I know you didn’t want to go, but I still can’t believe you agreed to this work trip. My mom surprised us with Billy Joel tickets tonight assuming we’d be together on our five-year wedding anniversary.”
When she got back from the bathroom, I felt awkward. I looked away from her and examined some pink peonies floating in the breeze to my right. I wished I hadn’t seen that message. I commented on the hollyhock. I thought she enjoyed working for me. The server handed us thick ivory cardstock printed with the desserts, listed in a lovely, curly cursive font. The menu had beautiful green leaves and the tendrils of vines dancing across the top border, with a black cameo of a woman’s side profile with a dainty updo embossed in the center. It contained the usual suspects: banoffee pie, custard tart, blackberry crumble, Eton mess, mince pie, and one that we had not seen in our three weeks of working on this project, cheesecake.
Jessica’s eyes lit up. “My grandmother won the Tennessee State Fair for her cheesecake three times. I love a good one, and with that raspberry compote? Mm! Maybe I’ll have some in her honor.” She picked up her robin’s egg colored teacup and made a cheers motion towards me. The gold on its rim caught the angle of the sun and made it glow for a second.
Still stinging from the text message, I mumbled: “I hardly think we should be celebrating woman who never left their houses. Got stuck in the metaphorical garden party, am I right?”
Jessica chewed on her lower lip. “Excuse me?”
“I mean, in all their poofy floral dresses, housewives just don’t contribute much to society, right? So much better to actually do something with one’s life?”
Jessica opened her mouth, but held her breath. She seemed to be considering her words. She tried to speak a couple times, but her voice kept coming out squeaky. Finally, she said: “She died last year. I couldn’t make it to the funeral because we were under a tight deadline for that skyscraper lobby project in Sydney.”
I shook my head once, down and up. “I didn’t know.”
Jessica shrugged. “That’s okay, I just don’t think I could have gone and made it back. We didn’t have the wiggle room in the schedule. Anyways, I’ll have to disagree because she contributed a lot to society. She had six kids, and fifteen grandkids. She often made me laugh until I cried and my chest hurt. She went dancing with my grandpa every Saturday night for five decades. She had the most gorgeous, embroidered cowboy boots and bright auburn hair. She kept her bright red lipstick and her 1965 beehive all the way until she had a stroke last year. It couldn’t have been easy to win the state fair that many times. She really perfected her recipes. She was filled with life, and knowing her made me so much of who I am. People like her enrich the experience of being alive for everyone around them.”
Jessica kept talking, but the server returned with a large water pitcher, covered in beads of condensation on the outside, and my ears became a lot more tuned into the clunk of the ice in the glasses as she poured.
By the time I started listening to my underling again, I realized she was asking me a question.
“Sorry, what was that?” I swept my long dark hair back over my shoulder and smoothed out my navy-blue button-up shirt, from a menswear brand that we could only buy in Paris.
“Oh, I was just talking about my grandma’s six kids. How wild that must have been having that many. We never really talked about – do you have any siblings?”
I felt a hot sensation behind my eyebrows. I have a complicated relationship with my brother and sister, and I hate being asked about them. I grabbed the dessert menu forcefully, deliberately. “Did you see they have a Victoria sponge too? And Île Flottante. You don’t see that often over here either. Let’s move on from the cheesecake, eh?”
Then I asked her many specific financial questions about our current project so that she had to pull out her rose gold Mac book onto the white linen lunch table. We both examined her extensive spreadsheet amongst all the primroses, foxgloves, and people drinking Pimm’s cups in their colorful, sculpted, and curvy fascinator hats. One was exceptionally pretty – sky blue with a big peacock feather extending far off the side of it.
Things shifted after that. I guess it was because before we arrived here, we needed to have an artwork inspected at a fabricator in Los Angeles. I didn’t think we had the time to send anyone to have a look who worked for me, so we had a freelance person who worked at one of my galleries inspect it before it was sent to England. They did a bad job back then apparently, and here now, maybe I yelled and kind of lost my shit a little bit and took out all my frustration on Jessica, even though in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn’t her fault. But I needed to do something with my frustration in order to feel better about the situation. I’d taught her to be very results-driven though, and it didn’t seem to bother her really.
Also, she was supposed to write reports on the condition of my artworks we’d shipped there for insurance purposes. I was walking by a painting and saw a brown dot I didn’t recognize. It was the tiniest thing, maybe left by a fly or some sort of insect. She’d left one of her binders open on a bench in the gallery, and she had a note that the dot looked inherent to the piece. She was wrong. Maybe I found her and really yelled at her about that too. Maybe I had to assert my dominance. People shouldn’t forget who I am – who they are dealing with here.
After this exhibit we were working on was going to open the following week, we had other plans in England. We were going to take a car service a few hours drive away to meet Marina Abramović and a few government officials at Sherborne Castle & Gardens, Dorset, a grand old country house with extensive formal gardens, to discuss a collaborative art project planned for the following year.
But that night, as I was walking back to my room from the gallery, in the tiny downtown core of Somerset, with its cobblestone, beige stones, little narrow bridges, and rambunctious boarding school boys, I could hear Jessica from the street. She was sitting outside at a pub with a foamy red beer and a red plastic basket topped with newsprint which held a few glistening golden brown pieces of fish. She was holding her phone to her cheek and angrily stabbing her chips into the little container of ketchup.
“Calm down? There’s not enough gin in this whole country to make this feel better. I just keep thinking that tomorrow might be better, and,” she paused and sniffled between each word: “It. Never. Is.”
I sucked in the lavender-scented air as I crossed under a wooden painted sign that said “King’s Head” and depicted an ornate gold crown on it. I saved her! I don’t even think she had signed up for an airline points system before she met me, and now she had the most elite airline status. I made her a grown-up. I made her relevant. When she met me she was the most mealy-mouthed, people pleasing, no identity, little puddle of nothing. All her life, she’d let people walk all over her, and I had given her something that was invaluable. I’d taught her to use her own voice, to not be afraid to express, demand, claim what she wanted. I had single-handedly transformed her into a bad-ass bitch. The first woman to represent the U.S. at the Bienal de São Paulo doesn’t fix her attention on just anybody. What an ungrateful brat.
I got back to my room and emailed her that I wouldn’t need her at Sherborne Castle anyway. In fact, I wouldn’t need her ever again. I was happy to pay for her airline change fee so she could go home the next day.
I never saw her again. I looked forward to the day that I might receive a job reference calling to check about her so that I could hear about where she was or what she was doing, and so that I could describe how precise she was with spreadsheets, how strategic she was with logistical long-term planning, how she could get people to agree to items when negotiating contracts that no one else ever could. Under her cotton candy exterior, I had pushed hard until I found a core of steel underneath. It was damn near inspirational. Until it wasn’t. But I had believed in her once, and I was disappointed that I never got to tell a soul that, because she never did write me down as a professional reference.
I continue to hire new assistants, clicking around on LinkedIn, and the staff pages for museums that are near my studio. If it’s a public institution it’s easy, because salaries are public information and it makes it quick work to figure out what an offer they can’t refuse would be. I just don’t find people who were as fun to be on the hunt for new works to buy at the secondary market art auctions with. I started just going there by myself, because none of my newly hired assistants could quite do it satisfactorily enough. This was even though I found it irritating being spotted by fans. I hated when people posted on social media about what I was purchasing. I bought a really cool Kara Walker preliminary sketch, and I even emailed Jessica a picture of it to brag, but she never emailed me back.
I asked another assistant what Jessica is up to now. They said she’s sewing children’s clothes and selling them on Etsy. Apparently, she moved back to her hometown in Ohio or wherever with her husband (was it Sam?). But I hope she learned something from me. I hope she didn’t go back to her old ways. And I hope whenever she’s in a bookstore, and she opens up a super heavy, vividly illustrated book about women artists, that my section is the page that it magically opens up to. I hope I continue to be a reminder to her that she can be better, do more, that she doesn’t have to accept just anyone’s crap at face value. But who can say, then again, maybe she won’t, and maybe she’ll just be an ungrateful brat with an annoying cheesecake fixation.
One thing that sticks in my mind, sometime after we got back from England, a manilla envelopment arrived. It was her receipts from her studio credit card, which we need to have on file for auditing purposes. There was no note inside. But there was a receipt from the night after I had overheard her crying into her fish and chips outside of that pub. It was from a restaurant in Knightsbridge, London.
The receipt read:
Sauteed Tender Stem Broccoli £13
Nusr-Et Special Salad £22
Nusr-Et Special Sushi £25
Wagyu Ribeye encrusted in 24 karat gold leaf £1450
24 Carat gold coasted pistachio baklava with maras ice cream £50
At that I stopped reading as closely, but I could see it continued: a few glasses of wine at seventy pounds each, a glass of champagne, plus tax and tip. I flipped through and there was also a receipt for a seafood tower (she ordered enough for two people that was sixty-five pounds!) at Caviar House Seafood Bar in terminal five of Heathrow Airport.
That one also had:
2 Glasses of Dom Perignon £650
I rubbed my tongue across the front of my teeth. I took a sip of iced coffee and looked out on the New York City skyline, the gorgeous postcard perfect backdrop of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, the stunning glistening of the sun on the East River. I rubbed my hands on the edge of the sturdy antique mahogany conference room table. I stared at all the little office windows for the rooms that served as the backdrop to so many different types of people’s lives: so many different dreams and points of view, so many men who promoted other mediocre white men who were barely qualified and did very little work, who quickly overlooked resumes sent in by the Maria Garcias and the Destiny Williams of the world in favor of their guffawing college buddies, in buildings built by construction workers who had called out all day every day during construction: “Hey girl, hey!”, “Nice ass!”, and “Smile more ya cutie!”
I flipped through the receipts and snapped them on the varnished table like a deck of cards. I wasn’t mad though. I was just impressed. Because what a bitch.
Emily Lemieux lives with her husband in a townhouse in South Seattle that’s filled with books, where she stalks neighborhood crows and hummingbirds on the rooftop deck. She has a Master’s degree in Library and Information Studies from Queens College, CUNY.
Order Now: Mai Tais and Mayhem: A Jet Set Investigations Mystery by Emily Lemieux
