“But why?”
“I can’t believe you’re even asking me that!” She literally stomped her foot. “Basically this is the most important thing I’ve ever written in my whole entire life! The whole fate of my life is being decided right now.” She swung her fists around.
“Isabel, Isabel. It’s okay. I hate to tell you this, but where you go to college—it actually doesn’t matter that much.”
She straightened, and her face hardened.
“It’s true. You’ll make some friends, you’ll take some classes, and then you’ll graduate. Wherever you go, you’re going to have a good life. That’s just”—and who knows why I said this—“that’s just especially true for you. Your life is going to be fine, no matter where you go to school.”
Her face contorted itself into something resembling hate. It was the most reaction I had ever elicited from her. “Where did you go to school? Harvard?”
“Yeah, Harvard,” I reluctantly admitted.
“So it’s easy for you to say!”
“No, yeah, no, that’s right, that’s true, but, um, you know, the general point still holds true. So”—I tapped her shoulder—“don’t drive yourself crazy. Don’t let them steal your adolescence from you.”
Since learning the name of Ian’s gallery—Milk and Honey—it had made me cringe. It seemed too blatant a celebration of gentrification, though it was hard to deny the sentiment: Red Hook did seem like the Promised Land, not least for Milk and Honey’s monthly parties, which had become the thing, a free bacchanal where a band played, drinks were served, and all the artists and scientists and philosophers whom Johan Lundberg, the very pale blond Danish founder, had gathered round him opened up their offices and studios.
It all sounded annoyingly hip to me, the kind of New York thing simultaneously overcrowded and over, but I wanted to support Ian, as a friend, by going.
It does not exactly take a genius of self-perception to see my true motive.
Lacie, of course, did not know anything about my true motive. Or she pretended not to know, or I was pretending that I didn’t know that she knew, or she was pretending that she hadn’t guessed that I was pretending not to know that she knew. By the time of Ian’s opening, we had reached a hall of mirrors. Her façades, the refractions of knowing, were so convoluted that I couldn’t even guess at which level we were operating.
Just this morning she had said, “Do you think it will be weird for you and Ian to see each other?” but when I asked her what she meant, she only shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It’s so public, and it’s his art,” as if that made any sense at all.
Regardless. When I told her I’d see her that night at the show, she hugged me—which she didn’t often do in those days—and said she’d see me there.
* * *
—
I arrived late. In the stone atrium, a swing band had taken the stage, white guys in goatees with trombones, and I bobbed briefly in the sea of Brooklyn plaid. Behind a card table a woman in a cream-colored dress with sleeve tattoos was pouring wine. I opened my wallet and caught her violet eyes, mouthing red.
When she handed me my plastic tumbler, she gave me a shy, pleased smile. As I drank, I thought it must be clear how much I needed it, my tension and anger X-rayed by this priestess of boxed wine. I asked for another. She hummed faintly under the music, a simple lulling tone.
I drank from the second glass of berry-black wine until Ervin had melted from me, and the high vaulted ceilings were a cathedral’s, and the party a glittery, shimmery net of meaning. Sobriety, I thought: nothing but a deliberate dodge of beauty.
Walking away from the band and the booze, I found beneath a soaring keystone arch a heap of dirt. Sculpture. In a shadowy corner where once longshoremen had stacked burlap sacks of coffee and crates of alcohol, a flickering film loop showed a hanging; endlessly the hooded body dropped. In the light of a camera obscura I observed a pregnant belly, bare and fuzzed like a peach. Thank God a 3-D printer had been fired up; in four hours we would have a fork. The showstopper, Johan’s own contribution, was an upright transparent coffin containing a human collaged from a million tiny cutouts of butterflies. I spent a long time looking.
On the second floor there was a giant cocoon suspended from the ceiling, knit entirely from ruby-red yarn. I climbed inside. The yarn was soft but strong, tightly woven, and the whole hammock swayed when I entered. Instantly the chatter and music softened, and the sterile blue-white gallery lights sank to a warm pinkish glow. A wave of luxuriant warmth swooned over me. Eyes closed, I listened to a fiddle playing down below. Its twang awoke some restlessness in me: I wanted to share. Where was Lacie?
When I wriggled from the red cocoon, I saw a little sign that said LUCINDA SALT. What? My brain assumed an error. Not until I took from a hard, clear folder one of those heinous artist statements did it quite register: Lacie had a piece in the show. Lacie had a piece in the show.
I found her down the hall, talking to some skinny Muppet-like hipster, but as soon as she saw me she broke away. In public we were each other’s priority.
She was wearing a white dress, like the woman behind the makeshift bar, but Lacie’s was vintage shirtwaist with mother-of-pearl buttons, over which she had slung a kind of bolero jacket. It looked absurd, and bold, and she wore it very casually. My black jeans and cardigan, chosen to seem like I didn’t care, suddenly seemed shoddy and shapeless. “Do you like it?” she hummed in my ear. She must have seen me climb out of her creation.
“I love it, oh my God, Lacie, I had no idea you had something in the show. Why didn’t you say something?”
Even as I spoke I was remembering the red yarn at the house, cardboard boxes mail-ordered, full of soft garnet spools, so deep and plush I couldn’t resist plunging in my hand, as if plundering a chest of rubies. She had said something. She had told me she was making a cocoon.
“It was just so last-minute, I wasn’t even sure it was going to happen,” she explained. I could tell she was downplaying it. I felt worse.
“So you’re an artist,” I said unsteadily.
The truth was that I had never thought of Lacie’s crafts as art. True, she was a founding member of the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee, which every year put on a Purimshpil of impeccable leftist credentials, collaborating with formerly incarcerated women or nannies from Domestic Workers United on bright giant puppets and curtains and papier-mâché masks, but though many jars of sequins were used, and many tambourines played, it had never seemed very serious to me.
She cocked her head. She took my measure. “I make things,” she said lightly, and I murmured a bit more about how much I liked the cocoon, how I felt it had held me, and then I said, “Take me to Ian’s art.”