You Know Me Well(21)

“Fortune does have a strange way of smiling, doesn’t it?” I say, unzipping the carrier. She’s going to have to drive fast if we’re going to make it downtown by four.

I really don’t know anything about painting. I don’t know whether the colors I see are right or if the shapes make sense. I couldn’t tell you which painters Katie is like or what style she’s painting in. But almost immediately I can tell one very important thing about Katie’s paintings: She means them.

I feel like I’m reading her journal. A journal made of poems, where the spaces and word arrangements are just as important as the words themselves. These paintings are not still lifes. There is nothing still about the life within them. Everything she’s pictured has elements that are present and elements that are missing—you feel the presence and the absence and have to figure out whether the figures are almost complete or just starting to dissolve. A rope stretching across the sky, with a girl trying to balance atop it. The rope is solid, but neither end is attached to anything. In another painting there’s a girl peering into a ring of fire. You can see her face all around the hoop, but when you look inside it there’s a starry sky where her eye should be.

A Pegasus with only one wing, turning toward the ground.

A starfish with a missing limb … but it’s the missing limb that you feel reaching toward a comet.

A lion with a whip for a tail.

An elephant trying to curve its trunk around a crescent moon.

And then, in the next painting, the crescent moon trying to curve itself around the elephant.

She’s painted these things as if every single one of them is real.

“I should turn the car around, shouldn’t I?” Katie says when I’ve been silent for too long.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I reply.

Katie seems satisfied by this.

“It’s just a lot for me to take in,” she says. “It’s one thing when your friends are seeing it. Or people at school. But with strangers—it opens up something else. It gives a whole different dimension to it. Because suddenly the art has to stand for itself. That’s weird to me.”

“You’ve had plenty of scrimmages with your team, but now this is the game,” I say.

“Yes. This is the game.”

I sense there’s something else she’s not saying. So I go, “And?”

“And … I can’t help thinking it’s tied to her. None of this would have happened without her.”

“None of it would have happened without you, either.”

“I know. But I guess my point is that it’s the combination. Her and me equals this. However directly or indirectly. This.”

We drive a while longer, letting Sky Ferreira and Lorde do the singing for us. I finish looking at her art—even though I’m strictly amateur, there are some pieces that can be eliminated easily. Rough sketches that are rough because they haven’t found their subject yet. Assignments that feel like assignments. A collage that’s supposed to be political but only ends up being obvious.

“Have you made your choices?” Katie asks.

I can’t believe she trusts me. But I nod anyway.

“Good,” she says. “Keep those in the portfolio and throw the rest in the backseat.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

She looks me in the eye and says, “Never.”

*

AntlerThorn is located in a somewhat trendsidential area off of Japantown. If it has a name, I don’t know it. All I know is that once we’re inside the gallery I am way, way out of my element. EDM is blasting Every Damn Moment, and the walls are painted the brightest pink I’ve ever seen.

“Intense,” I say.

“That’s one word for it,” Katie murmurs.

The music cuts off. The lights undim. A Mumford & Sons song begin to strum in the far background.

A man comes out of a door in the back and tells us, “Hello, hello, hello!” He’s got a grizzly beard and a Tigger bounce as he walks. He’s wearing a One Direction T-shirt, on which someone has spray-painted AND THAT DIRECTION IS OUT.

“You must be Ms. Cleary. And entourage. Audra is so sorry she can’t be here to see you. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. LOL!”

“Hi,” Katie says.

“Oh, how rude of me! I’m Brad. Bad-with-an-r! Or rad-with-a-B! Depends on which day you catch me! Can I get you something to drink? We have tap water, tap water, or tap water. We’re a nonprofit, after all. Not that we’re a charity—we just rarely turn a profit! Ha!”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Me, too,” Katie says.

Brad spies the portfolio in Katie’s hand. “Oh, goody! Audra just loved what she saw on your Instagram—she wasn’t going to take Garrison’s word for it! We always like to check the work in person before committing to it. It’s like online dating!”

Katie is starting to take deep breaths.

Brad talks on. “Sorry about the techno onslaught when you came in—Audra just wanted me to check it out for the opening tomorrow night. It’s so great that you can take Antonio’s place—I can’t believe Ross is being such a bitch about it, but you know, Ross was always jealous of Antonio’s art, in the same way that Antonio was jealous that Ross was sexting dick pics like they were spam. To each his own! Audra was so worried about the whole situation, and then you fell right onto our gaydar, and suddenly it was like, eureka, now we know what to do with Wall Six. ‘Get ’em hung!’ Audra told me. And I told her, ‘I try!’ Ha!”