“Um,” I say on a swallow, “I like your dress.”
“Thanks,” she says and smiles. “I wasn’t sure…”
“Wasn’t sure what?”
“Nothing. Just. I wasn’t sure it was the right…fit.”
I step back and twirl her around by the fingers. She obliges by allowing my hand to turn her in a pirouette. I stop her when her rear side lands facing my front side.
“Oh. Well. No, it’s the right fit. Can I give you a compliment?”
“Please don’t. Girls hate compliments on how they look.”
Kill. Ing. Me.
“I just…” I say. “Well, to quote the great poet and, I think, knight, Sir Mix-A-Lot, ‘Baby got back.’”
She pulls her shoulder to her chin and looks back at me. “Really?”
I nod as I turn her back around to face me head on.
“And front,” I say.
She giggles and looks down at my crotch. Pulling me toward her by the lapels of my jacket, she says, “Your front’s not so bad either.”
“Thanks.” I smile, my mouth close to hers. “I work out when I can.”
And just as her mouth and mine are about to connect again, I hear, “Oh…”
Turning my head, I see our pal Cheryl.
“Oh, hi, Cheryl.”
“Andrew. Eden. Um, I was just heading to… How are you both enjoying the building?”
“It’s got its perks,” I say, grinning.
“Indeed,” she says. “Very good. I’ll let you…” And she scurries off past us.
Watching her go, I say, “Oh, shit.”
“What?” asks Eden.
“I meant to ask her if she still has my pants.”
And as Eden’s murderously sexy giggle lands in my ear, we take our leave.
“OK, so… Ansel Adams it is not.”
Like, it’s really not. I just figured, at the least, it’d be some boring, traditional gallery with a bunch of bourgeois assholes oohing and ahhing over stuff that’s not really all that great. And then I’d be the bourgeois asshole explaining how it’s not, in fact, all that great.
But this is most decidedly not that.
First of all, it’s dark. Not pitch black but certainly dusky. In the middle of the room is a giant spool of barbed wire. And half-dancing, half-slithering around it are a half-dozen naked people. They’re climbing all over each other, occasionally bumping into the barbs and retreating. Some of them are bleeding.
A low, thrumming drone hums throughout the space, plodding and tribal in its groaning bass. I can feel the vibrations in my chest.
The pieces hanging on the walls are all sculptures and for the most part are fairly macabre representations of people in perverse sexual positions. Compelling and occasionally exquisite three-dimensional grotesqueries. Some bordering on genius.
“Oh, no,” Eden mumbles over the hum.
“Oh, no, what?”
“This… I’m so sorry. This is not at all what I thought it was going to be.”
I bend my head to her and lift her chin to make sure she’s looking at me. “Are you kidding? This. Is. Amazing.”
“What? Seriously? It is?”
“Yeah. Honestly, if anything, it makes me a little jealous.”
“Why?”
“This”—I wave all around me—“is what I wanted to do. It’s kind of what I thought I would be doing. It’s like… It’s like… Marina Abramovic meets Karen Finley with a touch of Andres Serrano thrown in.”
“Totally.” She looks around. “Who are they, then?”
I laugh. “Later. Come here.” I pull her over into a corner where a piece has caught my attention. “Look at this.”
She does. I can see that she’s having a hard time processing what she’s looking at. She stares hard and then goes to touch it. I pull her hand back.
“Probably shouldn’t touch the art. Unless you plan to buy it.”
“Oh. Shit. Sorry.”
“No apology necessary. It’s just one of those things. I’ve always thought it’s stupid. To my mind, the greatest compliment you can give an artist is to be so drawn to their work that you want to get closer to it. That’s what it should do. It should draw you in. Instinctually.”
“Yeah,” she says, staring at it.
I watch her looking at it and it fills me up. “What do you think?”
“Huh?”
“What do you think of it?”
“I mean, I think it’s … incredible.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why do you think it’s incredible?”
“Oh, I dunno. I’m not an art critic—”
“No,” I say, putting my fingers around her lips to stop her talking. It makes her look like a sexy duck. “No, that’s bullshit. Art critics are idiots anyway. I’m not asking you to critique it. Just tell me how it makes you feel.”
I let her mouth go and she steps back to look at it. I step back with her.
“I dunno,” she says. “It’s just… Well, at first glance, it just looked like kind of a piece of stone. Just, y’know, rock.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But then I noticed that there”—she points—“there it looks like people. Like two people climbing their way out of something. Like out of the rock, maybe.”
“Like maybe they’ve been trapped and they’re struggling to get free.”
“Yeah. That’s… Yeah. And then it looks like … are they having sex, I think?”