falling and the gross, sticky floor, the pearls scattered everywhere and the laughter of the Irony Girls. My shoulders bunch up as I cringe at my thoughts.
“So, I was hoping you’d come with me to an art opening tonight. I know it’s last minute and you probably already have plans, but it was really great to see you again and I think it would be fun because the artist is a friend of mine who does these really great—”
“Sure, I’ll go,” I say, cutting off Aaron’s rambling. I don’t have anything better to do and there is always free food and booze at art openings.
I arrange to meet Aaron at the gallery. He said he’d pick me up, and while I would like a ride, I tell him I’ll meet up with him instead. I hate walking, but the prospect of having to rush around and clean up after the mess Seth and I made the other night is worse.
It’s been years since I’ve been in a gallery, or at least in a gallery that sells work other than bronze cowboy sculptures and oil paintings of mountain landscapes. Wearing black is always a safe, if predictable, choice. My entire wardrobe is black, and I’d love to wear my favorite black pants and my big cowl-neck sweater, but the pants are a bit too tight and both pieces are in my closet in Canmore.
For a gallery, I need something sophisticated or angular and Japanese. I try on a long black skirt with tights and my lace-up Doc Martens ankle boots and decide it works. But I need a top.
After rejecting everything in my suitcase and my teenage wardrobe, I head to my mother’s bedroom. She was really into color, but there has to be something black I can wear. I go through her sweaters and shirts. I am not wearing anything that could be called a blouse. I find a black V-neck cashmere sweater and try it on. It’s tighter on me than it must have been on my mother, but it looks okay, though a little boring. I pull my arms back out of the sleeves and twist the sweater around until the V is in the back. You always see pictures of celebrities in low-back dresses and tops and I think I read somewhere—maybe in a magazine on the plane—that the back is the new erogenous zone. I line and fill my lips with MAC Russian Red lipstick and touch up the kohl around my eyes. I tug the front of the neck down, so it sits flat where the label is. That’s better.
It’s not Aaron who first greets me at the gallery: it’s Edgar. I’m surprised to see him there. Art didn’t really strike me as his thing. “Clients,” he says, nodding in the direction of two middle-aged men in suits contemplating a triptych of blank white canvases with one tiny black dot on each. “They wanted to experience the bohemian side of San Francisco, so I took them to the Haight this afternoon and they bought their kids hoodies at the Gap.”
“That’s so boho,” I say with a laugh.
“They’re from Ohio.”
“Ah.”
“There you are!” It’s Aaron. He gives me a kiss on the cheek and holds out two plastic glasses filled with wine. “I didn’t know if you preferred red or white.”
“Both,” I say and grab them from his hands. I down the white like a shot but when I take a sip of the red I nearly gag. It’s awful.
“Are you okay?” Aaron asks. “I’ll get you some water.”
“I’d stick with the white—at least until you’re sufficiently drunk enough to not be able to taste the red,” says Edgar.
“Good plan,” I say.
Aaron returns with a glass of water and another glass of white wine. I drink them quickly in succession. I look around the gallery. All of the walls are covered with giant white canvases, each having one small black dot painted somewhere on them. You have to get really close up to find some of them. The artist’s name is j.—lower-case, no last name.
“The restraint he shows is remarkable,” says Aaron. “It’s quite amazing.”
“It’s bullshit,” says Edgar. I smile at him and he winks.
“Then why did you just buy one?” Aaron asks.
“What Candice wants, Candice gets,” he says.
“Edgar’s wife,” Aaron says to me.
“This guy’s the latest greatest thing, so she has to have one. In six months, it’ll be up for auction and I’ll be staring at some new overpriced painting by the next best thing,” Edgar says, then turns to Aaron. “Do you think they have any scotch?”
Edgar goes off in search of scotch and to entertain his clients. I’m not exactly sure what he does, but it must be lucrative for him to afford those smart suits and to be able to drop ten thousand dollars on a painting he doesn’t even like.
Aaron and I circle the gallery and he tries to convince me how important and revolutionary j.’s work is. We run into a few of Aaron’s artist friends and they, too, are full of praise for j. and his revolutionary dots. I scan the room to see if I recognize anyone, but I don’t. I suppose I shouldn’t expect to—the city has changed so much in the years I’ve been gone. I tell Aaron I’m going to get another drink.
I walk the long way around to the drinks-and-snacks table, past the businessmen and gallery reps, the real artists and the wannabes. The patrons are obvious—they’re dressed in high-end office attire and the women wear heels and hose. The artists are just as cliché in their paint-splattered jeans and expensive glasses with asymmetrical European frames in any color but black. The wannabes are in layers of scrubby clothes and the girls wear tights with clunky boots. They’re dressed like they think artists dress, not like actual artists. I look down at my big black Doc Martens boots. It’s not the same at all—I’m not trying to pretend I’m an artist.
“You go to SFAI?” I turn around to find a young woman with dreadlocks facing me.
“Excuse me?”
“CCA? AAC?” she asks.
“Oh,” I laugh. She wants to know what art school I go to. “No.”
“That’s cool. I like your skirt.”
“Thanks,” I say. Hers is almost identical but about three sizes smaller to fit her tiny frame.
“You know him?”
“Who?”
“j.”
“Not really. Well, not at all actually. My—” What is Aaron? “My friend knows him.”
“You’re with Aaron Neilson, huh?”
“Not with-with him, but I’m here with him—yes.”
“His work is pretty good—better than j.’s.”
“And he has a last name,” I say, but the girl doesn’t laugh.
“Art cannot truly be art if it is bought or sold,” she says. I think about this. It sort of makes sense. “Come on, a bunch of us are going to smoke a joint out back.”
“I shouldn’t.”
The girl shrugs and turns to go. “Suit yourself.”
I look over at Aaron. He’s talking with Edgar and two other men in business suits. “Wait,” I call after the dreadlocked girl. “I think I will go with you.”
“Everyone always says we are living in a patriarchal society, but they’ve got it all wrong—we’re really living in a matriarchal society. It’s our mothers who fucked us all up,” says Nathan, the boyfriend of the dreadlocked girl, whose name is Tamara.
“That’s so true,” I say.
“I mean, look at those suit guys over there—who do you think they’re trying to impress?” Nathan points to Edgar and his friends. I don’t see Aaron. “Their mothers—they’re trying to impress their mothers. That is what my work is about—breaking free of the matriarchal repression we’re all victims of.”
I catch Edgar’s eye. He winks