“Maybe you don’t offer her money.”
“I offer her what instead?”
“A big-ass portrait.”
I start to laugh. “You’re insane.”
“Don’t laugh! I’m serious. Iona Taylor’s a diva, and what do divas want? They want to be seen! I bet if you offered to paint a life-size portrait of Iona, she’d snap it up.”
What Taysha’s saying starts to sink in. Everyone wants to be seen a certain way. Iona wants people to see her as a star. “That’s not a terrible idea. Especially if I could paint her in that dress. I bet there’s a pic of her wearing it online.”
“More like a thousand. She wore it on the red carpet.”
By midnight, we’re both exhausted, but Taysha’s finished the coat—the outside, at least. “I can line it after David photographs it. See what you think.”
She puts her arms in the sleeves and hands me her phone. “I need to see if it works,” she says, and starts to twirl. The Zoetrope Coat flares and the panels emerge from the folds. Like a flip-book, a story unfolds: A girl rises from the ground, her wrists in chains, then she surges into the air and the chains break. Fist raised, she transforms from captive to superhero.
I beam, watching Taysha spin on the screen. “It works, it’s amazing,” I say.
“I’m going to make T-shirts,” she says. “I’ll pay you royalties for using your artwork.”
“No, no way,” I tell her. “Your design. You own it. I was just the hands.”
“Then let me dress you for the exhibit.” Taysha reaches into the clothing rack and pulls out a dress. “You think that girl Kevin’s supposedly seeing will show up in anything that can compare to this?”
“No way.” I pull off my sweater and slip the sheath over my head. The brown leather is as thin as paper and it shapes to me. It’s a riff on flapper style, if flappers wore brass buckles on their hips. “Are you sure?”
“Pass up the opportunity to show this off to a roomful of artists and tastemakers? I’d be a fool to do that.”
I carry the dress out to my car and lay it gently on the seat. It’s late, but knowing Iona, there’s a good chance Tara’s still up, doing what assistants do. So I text her.
About a second later, she calls me. “I assume this is about your repayment plan.”
I’m tempted to be snarky right back, but I force myself not to. I need Tara to sell Iona on my idea. “I have a proposal.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“The dress is gone, which is my fault, and there’s no way I can give it back. But…what I can give Iona is a little of how it felt to wear it.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“What if I paint a life-size portrait of Iona in the dress? I could base it on photos of her on the red carpet. She can hang it on that big wall in the living room, and every time she walks in there, she can see how amazing she looked that night.”
Tara says, “Interesting,” and I can hear her amusement, as if she knows what it’s costing me to offer this. “This would be a realistic portrait?”
“I’ll even match her lipstick.”
“I’ll share this with Iona and get back to you. But not tonight.” Click.
Okay, then.
As I drive back to Mrs. Mednikov’s I think about Iona wanting to be seen. I’ve spent weeks thinking about how people judge Julie instead of seeing her, and how people would label me if they knew I’d lived in my car, but I’ve never once thought about why Iona is so desperate to have the cameras on her.
Mom always seemed to make excuses for Iona’s behavior, but now I wonder if she saw what was underneath it. I remember her telling me that if I looked past my feelings, I’d see people more clearly.
I park my car but don’t get out. Maybe it’s because I’m so tired that I can finally take in how the reason I’m probably in the messes I’m in with Krell and Adam and Iona is because I couldn’t look past my anger and fear and hurt. My feelings blinded me, and only now am I starting to see clearly.
On Friday, I deliver Seen/Not Seen to CALINVA for the First-Year Exhibition, and as I carry my canvas up the entrance ramp I feel like it’s weighed down with the irony that this could be my first and last exhibit.
Yesterday, Romy helped me mount Seen/Not Seen. The portrait of Julie as I see her is stretched taut over wood supports, while the black-and-white one hangs down from it like a discarded snakeskin tacked to the wood frame.
I’m glad I took a risk and played with dimension like Krell encouraged me to. The painting says everything I want it to say.
The white gallery walls are empty for now. The staff has leaned several canvases against the blank spaces, testing how to arrange the show.
Damn, I missed Kevin, I realize, spying Unresolved. Things have been so crazed this week, I’ve barely seen him.
Bernadette’s painting isn’t here yet, but I’m sure it will grab the choicest spot: the middle of the long back wall where a piece can be seen from every corner of the room.
Not surprisingly, three staffers are clustered around Bryian’s painting. Everyone’s talking about the enormous Asian baby biting the head off a toy North Korean soldier while other soldiers wait their turn. The official title is Our Benevolent Leader, but Kevin calls it Totzilla, and the rumor, which some of us think came from Bryian himself, is that Kim Jong-un has threatened “a merciless attack that will silence Bryian, the American imperialist warmonger.”
A bow-tied staffer dashes over to help as I carry my painting through the double glass doors. “Interesting,” he says as he takes it from me. “Name?” His red gingham shirt and the cresting wave in his gelled hair make me think of the Lollipop Guild from The Wizard of Oz.
“My name or the painting’s?” I answer.
He chuckles and takes the canvas from me. “Yours.”
“Sabine Reyes.”
“We have Reyes!” he calls out, and another staffer checks me off a list as bow-tie guy walks Seen/Not Seen deep into the room before setting it down.
Then he steps back and studies it, looking back and forth between Seen/Not Seen and the other paintings they’ve set in place. I can’t tell if he likes it, if he’s impressed, or if he sees hanging it as just another task he has to get done.
“Do you care where it hangs?” He lowers his voice and his eyes glitter behind thick black glasses. “Usually people want to be hung near a friend or away from a piece they…well, you know…”
Loathe?
It’s tempting to take over, but Krell warned us that behaving like a diva with the staff could get our work stuck in a dark corner. “Nope, I trust you guys to decide what works best.”
The look that comes over his face tells me not everyone listened to Krell’s warning.
“But there is one thing,” I say. “And I understand if you can’t help with this, but a friend of mine can’t make it to the show, so if you could hang my painting so she could see it through the window, I’d be really grateful.”
He smiles and digs a Post-it out of his shirt pocket. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says as he scribbles a note and slaps it on the painting.