He said, “Called Verlang, a woman answered, so they’re finally open. You have time for a little culture?”
CHAPTER
24
I picked him up in front of the station at six thirty-five p.m. Dressed as close to stylish as I’d ever seen: gray suit, black shirt, skinny brown tie. Pointy black oxfords instead of the desert boots.
I said, “New shoes?”
“Italian. Rick’s.”
We took the Seville at his request: “We’re talking art and your wheels are a lot more aesthetic.”
The drive downtown was a surprisingly smooth cruise on the 10 East slowed by construction detours and the need to navigate mostly empty one-way streets.
I found parking at a lot on Sixth and we walked to Hart Street, passing dark storefronts and several homeless people with placards, all of whom Milo ignored. No less altruistic by nature than with the legless man; preoccupied.
We stood across the street watching as a swarm of people crowded the sidewalk in front of Verlang Contemporary. A sign in the window readMelted Visions: An Opening.
The two neighboring galleries remained dark, as were the jeweler and the building’s top two floors. The only other illumination on the block came from The Flower Drum motel’s empty lobby. Clerk sitting alone in a glass-encased booth working his phone.
Milo said, “Hipster crowd. Think we can fake it?”
I pointed to the tie. “That doesn’t do it, we could go arm-in-arm if you don’t tell Robin and I don’t tell Rick.”
He laughed but not for very long. Narrowing his eyes, he watched the crowd for a few seconds. A single car passed. Then a bicyclist wearing a knit cap, pedaling a rattling one-gear with effort.
“Okay, here we go.”
—
No security at the door, just a thin girl in a matte-black dress and matching hair offering every arrival a plastic flute of something amber-colored and bubbly followed by a nearly inaudible “Welcome.” Her eyelids were smeared with something waxy and charcoal-colored. Hollow cheeks, painted-on eyebrows, the right-hand arc pierced by a little black ring.
The robotic greeting and a faraway stare said human contact was a contagious disease.
Not even a glance at Milo’s tie.
The gallery was jammed with mostly thin people and a few obese exceptions drinking when they weren’t moving their lips. The layout was a single long room painted flat white and floored in scarred pine. Track lights suspended from a central beam fifteen feet above showcased twenty or so large canvases.
The artist: Geoffrey Dugong.
Milo said, “Isn’t that some sort of seal?”
“Sea cow.”
“Now I know why I brought you.”
The thickest clot of chatterers had collected in the center of the room, as if herded by a sheepdog. More eyes on one another than the art. Milo and I circulated slowly and gingerly so as not to be noticed. No need to worry, not a lot of other-directedness going around.
We finally arrived at the edge of the crowd and got a look at Geoffrey Dugong’s work.
The name of the exhibit was literal: loose acrylic renderings of the same white candle in various stages of liquefaction over a black background.
We took one-page bios from a stack on a card table. Dugong’s bio specified little beyond his birth in Key West, Florida, and his work on fishing boats. On the flip side, a brief note by the gallery’s owner, Medina Okash, was even less informative. Written in the least comprehensive language on the planet: artspeak.
Geoffrey’s assumption of the identity of an endangered benthic mammal: simultaneously idiomatic and conceptual.
Growing up near the Atlantic, the pedestrian impulse would be to morph-adopt-become a local avatar:
