The Wangs vs. the World(82)
Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her jacket. It was Grace again. She had already called five times tonight, no doubt with some complaint about how weird Barbra was or how their dad kept trying to buy her ice cream sundaes like she was a little girl. Saina sent the call to voicemail again. Why couldn’t Gracie just text like a normal teenager?
At the far end of the gallery, a woman in her thirties with a pink bob stood behind a life-size papier-maché version of Lucy’s advice stand from the Peanuts comic strip, busily slicing oranges and limes under a sign that read PROUST AND PIMM’S 5 CENTS. Saina watched as she dumped the pile of citrus into a giant pitcher, poured in a few liters of soda water, and unscrewed a bottle of Pimm’s. Proust was, of course, represented by the pile of buttery madeleines her classmates were snatching off a platter as she shouted, “Five cents, guys, it’s a practical exchange!”
Saina had seen projects like this in New York—hospitality art, she and her friends called it. The ButterBeen Collective, who talked their way into a pop-up sit-in at the New Museum, which just involved teaching knitting and serving cookies, or the Shum twins, who offered “residencies” to donut shops at their gallery in Chelsea. How many times did people have to prove that anything could be art before we could finally admit that very little was actually art?
Theoretically, Saina understood it. Art was engagement, art was simplicity, art was an outgrowth of its time, and they were living in a moment in which service jobs were the fastest growing sector of the economy, so it made sense that artists would want to examine the actions that made up those jobs. They were in a period of new domesticity, where women had begun caring about making their homes perfect again—as far as she was from being a suburban housewife, Saina knew that she couldn’t deny her similarity to these women—and this was a valid way to critique the shift.
But, really, she couldn’t get over the fact that this was as far as their ambitions reached. It all seemed so needlessly ladylike. “‘I’ve made a very, very large meal, enough for multitudes, and I’d like you all to eat it with me! My creation satisfies your hunger.’?”
“Do you want a bite?” Leo held out a fallen slice, a hunk of crust soaking in a puddle of blueberry ooze, topped with a miniature plastic fork. Plastic. This room had none of what she missed about her former existence. The openings full of wild things corralled into white-walled bunkers and set loose amid armies of perfectly polished stemware, row after row of wineglasses and champagne flutes that chimed against each other delicately, a rarefied twinkle that underscored every conversation. She missed the way the women dressed themselves like pieces of art—their clothes complex and not sexually attractive in an expected way, yet in the rewritten visual code of that world, all of those bubble dresses and harem pants and complicated muumuus became more desirable than some cinched-waist-boobs-out look.
In this blazing bright room full of hopeful graduates, she felt deflated. Saina shook her head at the pie. Leo shrugged and forked it up himself.
“Why are you even eating that? It’s gross.”
“I’m hungry. We got here too late for the cheese and stuff.”
They’d never had a fight before. Leo had never been annoying before. She watched as his lips, glistening with a sheen of sugary blue syrup, mashed against themselves, chewing up the art pie. An hour and a half ago, those lips had been on her nipple.
“Why’d you get so weird?”
He stopped chewing and looked at her. “When?”
“You know, in the car.”
“Let’s not talk about that now.”
“Why not? Who cares about these people?”
“I thought you did.”
“Well, I don’t.”
They looked at each other, not speaking.
“Look,” said Saina, “I know we just got back together. It’s not that I’m dying to have a baby right now, okay? Don’t worry.”
“That’s not it. I—”
“Are you worried about Grayson? Because that’s over, you know. I’m here with you, not him.”
“No, Saina, listen—”
“Hi, Saina Wang?” Winged eyeliner, tangled black hair, flowered babydoll dress, and Doc Martens. Despite herself, Saina liked her.
“Hi.” Saina offered a hand. The girl took it and squeezed it.
“Thanks, but I actually want to see your other hand.”
She felt Leo suppress a laugh next to her. “What do you mean?”
“The ring! Sorry, I’m such a dork. Vogue’s like my bible. I read that story? The one about your engagement ring? I’m obsessed. Can I see it?”
Saina fluttered her empty left hand. “Sorry. It’s kind of like the way you’re never supposed to knit a guy a sweater or get your girlfriend’s name tattooed on your arm. Never let Vogue do a story on your ring. We’re not engaged anymore.”
“No! Are you serious? No! But you guys were, like, royalty. Was he a dick? Do we hate him?”
“It’s fine. Really.”
It was strange to think of herself as someone who might be speculated about, but back in college she had been just as breathless over the details of her professors’ lives, of the lives of the already successful artists who had graduated just a few years before, thinking mistakenly that knowing was the same as belonging.