She’d guessed wrong at the immediate source of his unhappiness, but his heart ached at her unwarranted concern.
“You’re the first person I’d invite,” he told her.
“I’d better be. I’ll bring an entire case of Midori for the bar, plus that terrible red stuff you like, and youknowI’ll buy something even if your show sucks, which it won’t,” she said confidently.
I love you, he thought, and the words in his mind were like the dot of pigment that changed the entire tone of the piece. Nothing looked the same to him. He saw everything differently since he’d known her.
“Thanks,” he said. He pulled his shoulders back, his mind reeling. Oh God, what was he going to do?
Caroline hesitated for another second, then leaned up to press another one of those featherlight kisses on his cheek.
Adrian took a deep breath, still tempted to beg her to go home with him instead of socializing with some of the people he least wanted to see in the world. “Let’s go gin up some interest in Tamsyn’s paintings.”
“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,” Caroline said, putting a hand on his arm to return to the beginning of the exhibit. “I think the paintings arewonderful.”
Caroline didn’t know why Adrian had said the gallery opening wouldn’t be a good party. This was the first party she’d ever attended not to prominently featurebirthday cake or a keg, and it was soothingly free of loud noises or oppressive odors. The white-walled space contained smiling people from her own age up to tiny old ladies in moth-eaten fur coats. Adrian had said the wine was bad, but all red wine tasted like someone had left a Juicy Juice out in the sun for too long as far as Caroline was concerned. Soft R&B standards played from an iPhone plugged into a speaker in the corner. They were going to spend the rest of the evening looking at art. If this wasn’t a good party, Caroline was going to be extremely impressed if Adrian ever did invite her to one.
Tamsyn’s new series—Chicks, Man—was all birds. Each painting was like a boudoir portrait of a different bird, rendered at life size or greater in loving, romantic detail. The brushstrokes were so tiny as to be almost invisible, and the colors were pale and old-fashioned, like in a pinup photo. There were stickers on the labels to show which ones had sold, and it appeared that about half had at that point in the evening.
Caroline enthusiastically marveled over the tiny details of feather and beak with whoever wandered nearby, and that was productive of new stickers on the labels.
It wasn’t hard to talk to people at the party. There was an intuitive script to follow.Hello, look at this bird. Isn’t it great to see so many people here?She could do this all night.
She wondered whether her efforts were better classified as sales or marketing as she drifted into a conversation with a group of other artists who seemed to know Adrian very well from the way the women kissed his cheeks and the man wrapped an arm around his shoulders and patted the back of his head. Adrian held very still for all of it, suffering like a cat whose fur was being rubbed in the wrong direction.
Adrian briefly ran his hand down Caroline’s lower back when he was done with introductions. Vanessa. Her wife, Jillian. David. All of them friends. Caroline would normally have taken Adrian’s touch as an attempt to reassure her, but he looked like the one who needed reassurance as the trio briefly demanded Caroline’s credentials—an MBA student, they didn’t ask where—before tearing into Tamsyn’s paintings.
“Did Tamsyn start working on this before or after the breakup?” asked Vanessa, the tallest and most commanding in presence. She wore a cropped leather jacket over high-waisted red silk trousers, accessorized with chunky gold jewelry. Caroline didn’t even know where you bought clothes like that, or how you knew they’d look good on you. Vanessa looked like a creature from an entirely different world from the one Caroline inhabited.
“After. This is the artistic equivalent of eating ice cream in your fuzzy socks,” declared David, whose small, unsettling blue eyes had latched on to Caroline’s cleavage upon their introduction and never strayed.
“She should have put these on her mom’s refrigerator instead of throwing a show though,” said Jillian, who was intimidatingly pretty, with hair bleached to a faint, fairylike shade of platinum. She wore an antique lace dress over dark brown stockings and over-the-knee boots. She wrote for an online magazine Caroline had never heard of, while the other two were artists. “Don’t invite the world into your therapy session. I can’t imagine what the critics are going to say.”
Adrian flexed his jaw, appearing to scan the room for some other errand they could pretend to be on. “I can imagine,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re right. Ithink this is good work, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Camila.”
“Maybe she’ll take her cash from this show and leave the country for a while,” Vanessa said. “That’s what I’d do. Lie low. Work my shit out.”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with the paintings,” Caroline said, prepared to unite with Adrian in a defense of the birds. “They’re gorgeous.”
“Oh, sure,” said David. “Nice draftsmanship. Very pretty.” Somehow it wasn’t a compliment in his mouth.
“Like furry art,” Vanessa snickered, and the others joined in.
Caroline didn’t know what that was, but it also did not seem to be a compliment.
“I don’t think it’s easy to make something that people want to look at,” Caroline insisted. “It’s a lot easier to paint a canvas beige and claim it’s a conceptual piece. That makes the audience do all the work.”
Adrian’s knuckles brushed her back again, and this time it felt like a warning, but hadn’t he said to be nice about Tamsyn’s art? And it actually was lovely.
“It’s easier than you think,” Vanessa said, chin tilted in with languid condescension. “What’s difficult is balancing that with a more interesting idea than beauty.”
“You don’t think there’s an idea behind these?” Caroline asked, surprised. The birds were a lot more compelling to her than the beige rectangles, and not just because she liked the arrangement and colors.
Vanessa sniffed. “If there’s an idea, it’s so obvious and textual that you can read it off a greeting card. ‘Look at these pretty birds.’ If you’re going to paint imaginary gardens, like Marianne Moore said, you have to put somereal toads in them. There’s nothing to anchor this. My generation killed irony, and I want it back.”
“There’s a little irony in the paintings,” Caroline insisted.
Adrian now had his hip pressed against hers, trying to indicate that they should step away and go back to the drink station. Caroline dug in her heels.
