Tom relaxed a little. “Well, there are an amazing number of rich people who are divorced, widowed, single, whatever, and they just want someone hot to stand next to them at their fancy rich-person things and impress their friends. You don’t have to sleep with anyone. You’re not meeting people in hotel rooms. You’re getting paid for going to parties and stuff.”
“What do you mean, ‘you’?” Adrian said, stiffening. “Do you mean ‘you’ like you or ‘you’ like me? Because I am not doing this, and I don’t think you should either.”
“Hmm. So. You can either serve clam chowder to tourists for an entire week, or you can look pretty for just a couple hours. How do you want to earn five hundred bucks?”
Adrian paused. His mind had already illustrated forty hours at a restaurant, and it looked not like Renoir’sLuncheon of the Boating Party, but like someone throwing iced tea in his face because he didn’t bring the drink refills fast enough. Unwillingly, his mind began to sketch an easier job, one that would still leave him time to paint.
“Five hundred dollars? Are you serious?” he said, wishing the words back as soon as he’d uttered them.
“As a heart attack. That’s what we’d ask for. You’d only have to go out with someone a couple times, and we’d be clear on rent.”
It still sounded dangerous and unlikely to Adrian, evenif toiling in food service was not exactly appealing either. “You were making that much money to go out with people, no expectation that you would...” He didn’t finish. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.
“Well, I was making a few hundred dollars a week, but I think you could do better than that,” Tom said.
“But why?” Adrian regretted saying that, because that made it sound like he was really considering it, which he wasn’t.
“Because you look good!” Tom said. He eyed Adrian, who was dressed in jersey pajama pants and a bleach-spotted Boston Public Radio T-shirt because he hadn’t gone outside yet. “I mean, maybe not at this exact moment. But you are, like, the most attractive person I know in real life. You’rehot—hotter than I was at twenty-three, even. Take advantage of that.”
“You sound like you’re trying to get me into the back of your van so you can take photographs of me,” Adrian deflected, uncomfortable every time his looks were mentioned. Too many of his old reviews had been organized around the theme of “pretty man makes pretty art.” Which didn’t lend much to his reputation as a serious artist.
“If I owned a van, you could be driving for some rideshare app, and we wouldn’t have to have this conversation,” Tom said airily. “But, you know, the more I think about this, the better of a solution I think it is. Why should you get ajobjob? Let’s just bridge the gap until you can sign with a new gallery or the restaurant can give me more hours.”
Adrian closed his eyes tightly and rubbed his forehead with his palm.
“I could get a job,” he mumbled.
“You’ve neverhada job. But you have spent five years sucking up to a really terrible rich lady—”
“Tom,” Adrian warned him, because he didn’t want to hear Tom trashing Nora. Or suggesting that they’d been together because of her money. Which wasn’t true. Or, at least, hadn’t been true to start out with.
“Oh, fine, you know I didn’t like her. But you have to admit you get along with those people. Better than you would with the average fast-casual-restaurant diner, anyway. Picture yourself getting paid to stand around and be handsome. Now picture yourself still on your feet, still handsome, but you’re in a seafood shack, you’re earning four thirty-five an hour, and your table of twelve is yelling at you because they had to wait ten minutes for their lobster rolls....”
It might be the best bad option, put that way.
“What would be involved, exactly?” Adrian said, trying to stress the reluctance in the question.
Tom beamed at him, newly energized by this horrible scheme. “First, we make your profile. You still own a tux, right? Let’s dress you up. Like you’re going to a silent auction to benefit the Society for the Advancement of Shrimp Cocktail and Prevention of Testicular Cancer.”
Adrian did own a tux, even though he had loathed Nora’s charity-ball circuit. It always felt like performance art: a dance performed for some of the worst people in the world, who didn’t actually care about supporting the arts but liked the idea of rubbing elbows with artists. He supposed putting clothes on for money was marginally better than taking them off though.
“You can do it,” Tom urged him. “You’re exactly the arm candy a certain kind of woman is looking for. Didn’tNora always complain about rich people hitting on you at gallery openings?”
“I hate those people.”
“Don’t be so prissy about this. Come on.” Tom groaned. “It’s bummingmeout to see you on the couch all day long. This is depressing, you know? You look like a very depressed person. Let me just set you up a profile. It’ll get you out of the house at least.”
Adrian demurred.
Tom insisted.
Adrian offered to sell some plasma.
Tom told him he could keep every single bodily fluid to himself.
Eventually, Adrian felt exhausted from the longest conversation he’d had in weeks, and he gave in. At Tom’s instructions, Adrian dug his tuxedo out of his luggage, put it on, and stood against the wall. Tom had one of Adrian’s old paintings hung over his sofa—a sentimental one, lush florals and bright colors, the sort of thing he hadn’t done in years—and it was going to serve as proof of his bona fides as artist arm candy. Adrian uneasily shifted from foot to foot as Tom tried to take a decent picture under the cheap fluorescent track lights.
“Just use an old picture,” Adrian complained. “Grab the one off my gallery page.”
