“It was shitty of me.” I put an edge of tragedy in my voice, like when the girls on my hall talked about Sebastian. “I’m sorry, Hiromi.”
She sighed, giving me a ginger sucker with a softened flavor, like a gnarled old root left too long in the larder.
“Crystal’s right,” I said. “All I’ve got is family connections.”
“She grew up here. She’s been going to galleries since she was three. You were raised by wolves.”
“Wolves are highly intelligent.”
“Which makes them dangerous. When you look at this bust, what do you see?”
I stared at the battered block of wood. “A hint of eyes, a gash of mouth.”
“But under that?”
I looked harder, thought about the lightning movements of the robotarm. Ziggy flying through the air, a large and imprecise missile—hitting, missing, skimming, sticking. “Trajectories.”
“But underthat.” Hiromi gazed at me like I was the object on display.
“The randomness of art? The chaos of uncontrolled processes?” I sighed. “See?Thisis why Garrett doesn’t want me in the gallery. Maybe if we go to more openings, more parties. I might meet some real collectors.”
She turned back toward the target, contemplating the half-formed face. But also wondering how to help me.
My Martini was warm now, the olive’s brine concentrated in the last drops, as salty as Hiromi’s skin.
36
“Where the hell did you get that?” Hiromi asked.
“Family car,” I said. It was an Aston Martin ragtop from the eighties, one of Uncle Orrin’s Gotham fleet, picked up that morning from a parking garage near our Brooklyn properties.
“I thought you were renting,” she said.
“Mortons don’t rent.”
“Must be nice,” Hiromi said. She’d spent the last week on edge, nervous about Lyon’s party, quietly irked at me for saying yes to her kind offer. Standing there on the sidewalk, bag in hand, she seemed close to calling the whole trip off.
I began to take down the convertible’s top.
Hiromi came closer, entranced—windshield clips, hinges and pivots, the origami of vinyl vanishing from sight. On our walks, she always paused to watch machines in transformation. Roller doors, retractable awnings, folding bicycles all enchanted her.
When the car’s metamorphosis was complete, she dropped her overnight bag into the back seat.
“Well,” she said. “At least the drive will be fun.”
I waited untilwe left Manhattan to speak again, after we’d negotiated the crawling funnel of the bridge, the tangle of interchanges in New Jersey.At last we broke free onto the open highway, forested hills rising on either side.
“Thanks for doing this. I know you hate him.”
Hiromi didn’t answer at first, staring into the sky. The wind turned her hair into a storm of black tentacles.
“If you only sell art to nice people,” she said at last, “you starve.”
“Lyon will buy your work whether or not we go to this party. You’re doing this for me.”
She put a hand on my shoulder, letting the subject drop into the well of this perfect afternoon. Here outside the city, the asphalt heat had lifted, the air smelled of trees and grass. The high clouds were backlit, their edges opaline through my polarized sunglasses.
Our conversation came slowly, punctuated by the stretched-out silences of the road.
