The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone Read online

  That entire week we slept facing each other. Same breath, same pulse.

  “Synchronicity empowers me,” Addison told me. She even wrote it on my bathroom wall, in this beautiful lettering over my medicine cabinet. I look at it every morning, though now of course, since she’s been gone, the message reads very differently.

  On the last morning, we woke up and realized we’d been holding hands all night. Thoughts of failure—an unsuccessful break-in, getting arrested and becoming the punch line of the next day’s news, defeating her ego, destroying her reputation—we refused to think about that. We were on the tightrope, and we couldn’t look down.

  DOMINICK LUTZ: Addison had made a replica of the plastic-encased museum card to replace what she’d exhibited. So instead of having a card that read, Addison Stone: Self-Portrait, it read, Film of the Theft of the Self-Portrait of Addison Stone. I always loved that touch. Addison could get the details so right, from restyling her T-shirt to that last stroke of the brush that jumped an image to life. She did nothing halfway.

  That night of #53, we’d set up a tripod in front of her piece. The video is simple—all you see are the white-gloved hands, like butler’s hands. Cam, me, and Addison. We remove the painting from the wall and take it offscreen. Addison was supposed to replace herself. Reposition her portrait with her own face on film where the portrait had been hanging. Then five long beats, click the remote to stop the camera, boom. End.

  Our plan was to leave the tripod right there, and run this on an unending loop. So instead of looking at Addison’s portrait, you’re watching the movie of the portrait being stolen, and the subject of the portrait take the portrait’s place—as if she is sitting for her portrait.

  That night, everything is clockwork. Addison did her beats. But then, after she jumped off, she whipped out a can of spray paint from her hoodie pocket and tagged, Z, FUCK U on the wall. The whole thing was so immature. So beneath Addison Stone’s artistry. Plus it added seven crippling seconds to the video. It was completely wrong for the flow and the meta of the film.

  Cam and I came as close as we ever have to writing Addison out of our lives for that. We’d risked big. For sure, part of me is still in grudge mode. I still have dreams where I’m yelling at her. Even now. She’d dragged us into this high-art stunt, and then she turned it into a vendetta against an old boyfriend? We both felt betrayed.

  LUCY LIM: Addy’s mind was genius. But her heart was sometimes stuck in high school. And how can you blame her for hating Zach? Or for taking out her anger in a major public way, which was where Addy took everything? I wish she’d had more time here. Time on earth, I mean, to make truly spectacular and mature works of art. Addison never grew up. She never got to become the force she ought to have been.

  LINCOLN REED: Up till the moment Cam showed me the feedback loop, I’d been hugely respectful of #53. But when I saw Ads writing that message—to Zach Frat, of all people—I felt sick. So wrong. First I felt like Addison had stepped into dog shit as an artist. Second, I felt that she’d screwed our relationship. My usual reaction to a situation I can’t process was just to bolt. So I did.

  STARGAZER LUZ: My brother drove straight from New York to see me in Key West. All the way down the East Coast. It took him a day and a night, and he pulled in around 3 A.M. We sat in my kitchen, and he spilled his heart. He talked about how much he loved Addison Stone, and about how he couldn’t deal with her—her careless habits, her demands, the emotional space she sucked out of his private life. He told me how he hated Gil Cheba and Zach Frat and Max Berger. He told me how her mania unnerved him. He told me he was debilitated to think he’d never know a love as big as his and Addison’s. At the same time, even the love felt like too much.

  But mostly he talked about what Addison did at the Whitney. He couldn’t believe that after all the prep work, and all the conversations, the soul-searching, and all the deep thinking that Addison put into this project, that she’d gone and made it into a Zach-revenge thing.

  At one point, Addison sent him a photo of what she’d done to her self-portrait. She’d blurred the eyes and mouth. “My Face Is Tears,” she wrote him. “Come back to me.”

  I advised him not to. Nobody knows what it’s like to live with a ticking time bomb unless you’ve done it before. Mom and I’d lived that way with Robard. And it was awful. Truly damaging.

  My Face Is Tears by Addison Stone, courtesy of The Sinclair Corp.

  MAXWELL BERGER: “Art Babe Takes Self, Leaves Proof.” It’s a killer headline, the one in The Times. Big, honking scandal. I couldn’t have scripted it better, except for the bullshit at the end. But I got that changed, got Zach Frat excised. The next day I had my people scrub the video, so that it could be what it was meant to be. Addison knew we’d get techies to trim it. So nobody who saw the Biennial ever saw Zach. And as everyone knows, Addison was the hit of the show.

  ERICKSON MCAVENA: Now that Addison’s gone, and there’s a basic agreement that the arts lost another genius, there’s also a conversation out there about the lasting significance of her work. I’m real pleased for that. But when she was alive, a lot of people treated her mostly as a curiosity—a high-stepping, three-legged show-pony. You can take Max Berger to task for a lot, but he always knew she was major. The fact that she’s so big now, revered, so soon after her death—I’m not sure if it would have made her laugh or pissed her off.

  ZACH FRATEPIETRO: In the end, if you cracked open everything that was Addison, and spread out all of those different parts of her life in front of you, the machine always builds and rebuilds to create an Addison-and-Zach monster. That’s all I’m saying about #53.

  BILL FIELDBENDER: While Addison was thinking up Project #53, we knew she’d been working on a few other portraits. She Skyped with Arlene and me when she finished Exit Roy, and Max Berger sold her self-portrait, too—her careful disfiguring of her eyes and mouth had given it an extra measure of notoriety.

  She’d also, very quietly, been doing some studies of Sophie Kiminski. She had alluded to the Sophie studies once or twice, but she was always so self-critical about her early sketches that, until a finished piece emerged, it was best to assume that she was slashing Xs and discarding most of this effort.

  Arlene and I really liked the finished Exit Roy as an example of a certain style of painting Addison was exploring. There’s such deep psychological insight in this image. Her father looks washed away, uncertain, absent. As if everything he’d ever wanted to become had been siphoned out of him.

  Exit Roy by Addison Stone, courtesy of Saatchi Gallery.

  LUCY LIM: I saw the sketches of Sophie. She showed them to me secretly. They were really good, but kind of a shocker. Addy absolutely did not want Lincoln to find out. Everyone knew Sophie had a coke problem, and Lincoln hadn’t been able to get Sophie clean, and Addy kept imagining and reimagining Sophie all coked-up and spooky. When Addy sent me some snaps, I just about fell over. I advised her to bury the whole concept.

  “The thing is, Max wants me to finish a Sophie portrait,” she told me on one of our calls. “He says there’s already a buyer.”

  “No, Addy. Don’t put it out there,” I said. “Lincoln and Sophie had a past. He doesn’t want to be reminded. You’ll hurt him.”

  “What about my hurt? Sophie’s always talking to people about how I don’t deserve Lincoln. How I’m overrated.”

  “She’s troubled. Rise above it, Addy.”

  But Addison didn’t like to compromise her interests. For many reasons, Sophie Kiminski was such a forbidden fruit. Addison couldn’t resist.

  After the Whitney, I think Addy could have sneezed into a tissue and sold it. But I knew she was following Sophie’s big mouth in the press, and we all read in the tabloids how Sophie had checked into rehab for her coke habit, and Addy had on good account—Gil Cheba was friends with some friends of Sophie’s—that Sophie had big plans to get Lincoln back once she’d cleaned up. This only fueled Addy’s interest in capturing and owning Sophie through her
art. I don’t think Addy had expected how annoyed Lincoln would be.

  “What do you accomplish by obsessively painting my ex-girlfriend?” he’d ask. “It’s not the art you should be doing. It’s creepy and sensationalist.”

  She’d call me and tell me about these arguments they’d have, and of course I was always sensitive to Addison’s point of view, but I have to admit, I sided with Lincoln. A million portraits to paint, and she’s painting vapid, wasted Sophie? Why go and stir that pot?

  LINCOLN REED: Finally, it got to the point where Ads swore she wasn’t working on a finished piece, but I knew that she secretly was. It depressed me that I had to hear about it through the gossip mill. And later, I found out that Berger Galleries sold the painting quick and dirty, in a private sale to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed amount. Obviously, Addison tried to keep the work, and the final-price sale, from me. She thought it would hurt me. She was right.

  When I reassessed the relationship, the short story was that in a span of a few short months, Addison’d moved into my place, trashed it while creating Project #53, made sure that everyone remembered #53 as a Zach Frat moment, snuck off to her Chelsea studio to paint disturbing portraits of my ex-girlfriend—who at that time was apparently dating Zach—and then sold one of these portraits to a private collector through her dealer and got everyone to lie about it to me.

  Soon after #53, the last weekend in March, I was doing a Face the Nation program in Washington. It was part of a panel on war tactics. Some of my pieces about chemical warfare were getting well-reviewed. Also, one of my half brothers was serving in Iraq. I guess the wonks thought I’d have something to say about chemical warfare, and its place in our history and our now.

  Going on journalism television was a serious performance for me. Just like the Whitney had been for Ads. But where I’d been there for her, to help her, Addison was only a source of stress for me. Once I started thinking about her as harmful, almost a poison, my own personal relationship toxin, well, I couldn’t unthink it.

  No matter how much I loved Addison, I didn’t want to keep breathing her in. Not when I could feel all the negative effects on me every day. I felt that she was crushing me, negating my space in the world. I had to let her go.

  Addison leaving her apartment on 68 Front Street, Brooklyn, NY, by Sam Jeffrey for New York Daily News.

  X.

  THE JOY DIZZIES

  MAXWELL BERGER: Addison came to me that spring. Must have been late April. She’d never done that before, never visited my office. But after she’d sold Exit Roy, she dropped by personally to pick up the check—the fattest check our accounting division had ever cut for her. She’d moved out of Lincoln’s place and was renting-to-own an apartment on Front Street where all the kids were living, in DUMBO—Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. So she was back in Brooklyn, which seemed better for her. I was glad to give her the money. ’Course I had to take a chunk. But there were all the expected legal issues with the Whitney stunt, and so all of the lawyers and consulting fees would have to come out of the profit. That’s the way the game is played.

  Addison had been depressed. It wasn’t a trade secret that the split with Lincoln Reed was the reason, but I don’t get my nose in people’s personal lives. These young artists, they’re always sexed up, screwing this one and screwing over that one. I can’t keep track, and I don’t want to. But when Addison came strutting into my office with that puss on her face, I knew she’d bite my head off if I asked her what was the story.

  I gave her a bottle of champagne to celebrate the sale. Just pretending along like everything was hunky-dory. Her chin was up, and her armor was on.

  What do I recall most of that meeting? The last time I saw Addison? I remember she had on more airs than the Queen of England. I remember that she was sitting across from my desk, asking me about future sales and commissions. I could feel that she had her same bad taste in her mouth for me. She was interrogating me. But I didn’t mind. I’ve been in this business a lot of years. Addison was a one-of-a-kind talent. Hey, I was glad she wanted to know. Sometimes it’s good to peek inside the factory and see how the sausage gets made.

  I did say something to her, toward the end of our powwow. “Addison, kid,” I said, “you’ve got everything on God’s green earth to look forward to. You shouldn’t let these little shits, Zach or Lincoln or any of ’em, ruin all the things you’re working for. Get greedy. Get greedy for yourself. That’s who’s gonna pull you through the hard times. Rescue yourself, and the rest will follow.”

  And she stared at me, it must have been a full fifteen seconds, before she said the last words I ever heard out of her mouth, “Berger, you know what? You talk a good game, but you’re just like every other scumbag I ever met in New York. I don’t need you to tell me how to get greedy when you’re part of my whole fucking problem.”

  And she stood up, and she snapped up the check, stuck the bottle of champagne in her backpack, and she left. Of course, when I sold Bloody Sophie, the money was triple what she got for Exit Roy. To this day, Bloody Sophie is probably her most valuable piece.

  LUCY LIM: When Lincoln had asked Addy to move out of the Elizabeth Street loft, devastated didn’t even begin to describe her. She was shipwrecked. I was angry with him, sure, but could I blame him? Not in my heart. She’d become impossible to live with. But losing Lincoln took all the wind out of her.

  Right afterward, Addy heard a rumor—false, it turned out—that Lincoln was seeing Sophie again. She also believed that after #53, Zach was using all his power and pulling every string he could to get her blacklisted from the scene. She assumed that he was asking for her to be banned at power parties and dropped off high-end invitations to openings and events. I have no idea if any of that was true, but in different ways, both of her exes were pulling her apart.

  “Come home to Peacedale for a while, Addy,” I’d tell her on the phone. “What’s prettier than a New England spring?”

  “I don’t have the time,” she’d say. “I’ve got too much work.”

  “You’re burning yourself out,” I’d argue. “Your mom wants to see you. And you need to rest. At least if you’re in Rhode Island, you know that you’re not missing anything. There’s nothing to miss.”

  The problem was, she never wanted to rest.

  Then, I swear it was the first truly perfect pink-and-white day of spring, Addy found that place on Front Street. She sent her mom and my mom and me all the images, with these emoji hearts and smiles and captions like “maple-stained hardwood floors” and “big shower space” and “skyline!” And suddenly she seemed very grown-up. DUMBO was exactly her neighborhood, chock-full of up-and-comers, and she’d fallen in love with it. She’d made that money off Exit Roy, and she wanted to show she was a success. Or that cool things really can come out from dead-end romances and heartbreaking breakups.

  ERICKSON MCAVENA: I was the one who helped Addison get on the stick and move herself out of Lincoln’s.

  “Will you come move me out, and wipe my nose when I cry?” she asked.

  “I’ll even bring the hankies,” I told her.

  When I arrived on her doorstep on move-in morning, instead of a U-Haul truck, there’s only a cab outside. The girl owned nothing.

  “For all the crapola you like to steal, you don’t have jack squat,” I teased her. Seriously, she had a couple of suitcases, a couple of boxes. The end.

  Me and Teddy actually did rent a U-Haul a day later, and we brought her everything she’d left on Court Street. From her ugly sunburst coffee mugs to her stuffed rhino and even the velvet sofa. The tub stayed. That thing was too goddamn heavy, and about as useful as a trapdoor on a canoe.

  Underneath, I guess I felt all kinds of guilty. Addison wanted to move back to Court Street. She’d crashed there the first weekend after the Lincoln breakup. But by then Teddy was moved in, snug as a bug. Plus we had a Craigslist tenant, MaryKate Harrington, who wasn’t any Addison, but she was going to Fashion Institute of Tech
nology, and she was paying us a pretty good rent. We couldn’t just dump MaryKate a month into it. Addison knew it, but she still begged pretty hard.

  “Just please let me stay there for a month or two.”

  “Sugar, there’s cozy. And then there’s the sardine tin,” I told her.

  “I know, I know.” Then in a joking way, but kind of wistful, she said, “Maybe I could sleep on the fire escape? We could put a tin roof up. I wouldn’t bother anybody.”

  She slayed me. I was real sorry I couldn’t give her that room back. I felt lower than a worm about it. So I was relieved that Addison seemed knee-deep in clover about her new digs. It had a bathroom like the Bel Air. I guess it was around that time that Addison decided to stop working at the Chelsea studio, too. She wanted to live and work in the same space. A good call, I thought.

  Move-in day, early June, was my only time I ever spent at her new place on Front Street. Teddy and I were never in that apartment again. So I don’t know how she changed it up, or if she ever made it her own, the way we’d been talking about it. But that night, after we’d hauled and unpacked, the three of us ate a picnic on the floor. It was a French-style dinner, with a bottle of wine and some cheese and bread.

  “Turn this space into your home, Addison,” said Teddy. “Buy some lamps and rugs. Get a fricking goldfish.”

  Addison Stone in her Front Street apartment, courtesy of Lucy Lim.

  “Or maybe I’ll just steal two big-ass Barcaloungers right off the showroom floor of JCPenney. Along with a flatscreen and shag carpeting,” she answered. “And heist some art from the Whitney.”

  When we finally left, Addison looked as lonely as the last pea at pea-time. I was relieved Lucy Lim was coming down for a few days the next week. But it was hard to say goodbye to Addison. For a moment, I guess I experienced a sense of doom. It was so unbearable. Teddy says it was a premonition. I don’t know. I should have let her come back to Court Street. I should have been the one to sleep on the fire escape. She wasn’t ready to live all by herself. I knew it. Everyone knew it.