“That makes absolutely no sense,” Parvati muttered under her breath.
Zara jabbed her with an elbow. She was used to Indra’s enthusiastic interpretations. “You want it to be a surprise,” she translated for Parvati.
“Exactly, darling.” Indra pressed her hands together, red-painted nails gleaming in the light. “I’ll go let your dad know you’re here.”
“This is who you picked for Jay?” Parvati shook her head, watching her go. “Babe, you’re losing your touch.”
“I haven’t seen her for a while. I forgot how excited she gets when there’s a show. But she’s got a master’s in art, good connections, and I’ve never once seen her with a hair out of place.” She looked around the bustling gallery for Jay. After their slightly awkward conversation at the restaurant, she wasn’t sure if he would show up tonight.
“I wonder what she’d be like in a hospital gown,” Parvati mused. “You’d be surprised how a person’s true nature is revealed once you strip away all the trimmings.”
“Not really interested in imagining anyone in a hospital gown, Parv.”
“Really?” Parvati’s voice rose in pitch. “That’s the first thing I think about when I meet someone new. What’s underneath? What are they trying to hide? How much ass is going to show through the crack that can’t be closed?”
“My two favorite girls.” Zara’s father came up behind them and wrapped his arms around their shoulders. He had always been the most affectionate in their little family of four. “I can’t believe how many people are here.” He released them to say hello to a couple nearby.
“You’re just such a perfect daughter,” Parvati whispered in her ear. She was the black sheep of her academic family, disappointing her parents because she’d become a doctor instead of getting a Ph.D.
“Just don’t tell him I invited everyone. I’ve never seen him this excited.” Her father’s shows were usually low-key affairs attended by family, critics, and a few of his loyal supporters. Although he sold enough to pay the bills, his work had never attracted the kind of attention Zara thought it deserved.
“I want to introduce you to the partners from my new law firm,” Zara said when her father rejoined them. She had been pleasantly surprised when they’d expressed an interest in coming to the show.
After a brief chat with Tony and Lewis, they worked their way around the room chatting with all the guests while Parvati waited at the makeshift bar for drinks. It warmed her heart to see her dad so happy. She could never forget how utterly devastated she’d been the day her mother asked him to leave. Even now she still felt a niggle of fear that someone would tear him out of her life again. They were a family; then they weren’t. Within days of his departure, every trace of her father had been removed from the house. His paintings stripped off the walls, cooking pots emptied from the cupboards, clothes ripped from their hangers. His outdoor studio disappeared one afternoon while she was at school, to be replaced by a garden box that never saw a single seed.
“Attention. Attention.” Indra tapped her glass with a spoon as if they were at a wedding and it was time for the bride and groom to kiss. The white-coated waiters put down their trays, each taking up a place beside a painting. “We’re ready for the big reveal. Someone dim the main lights. The switch is beside the door.”
Zara looked over to make sure someone was covering the lights. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw Jay at the entrance with a friend. Tall and heavily muscled, the dude was Parvati’s type right down to the beachcomber hair and the lack of a tie.
At a wave from Indra, Jay lowered the lights until the only illumination in the gallery came from the spotlights directed at the sheet-covered paintings.
“We now present to you a study in the female form. A decadent rendering of the essence of a woman. Prepare to amazed, astounded, challenged, absorbed.” Indra raised an arm and the waiters pulled down the sheets. “I present . . . Vulva Fruit.”
Oh. My. God.
Zara couldn’t speak. Her breath was trapped in her lungs. She stared at the giant paintings of fruit cut in half and displayed as female genitalia. A papaya, dark seeds spilling from the center. A peach with soft pink flesh around a dark core. She would never be able to look at an orange again without thinking about the suggestive curve of juicy segments around a hollow center. And who would have thought a cantaloupe, a quarter sliced out to reveal the sweet and sticky center, could be so erotic? Worse were the fruits with fingers in them, gently resting on the lips of small openings, or thrust deeply into soft centers.
Bile rose in her throat. Her knees wobbled. She bent over heaving as her betraying lungs refused to let in any air.
“You’re okay.” Parvati rubbed her back. “It’s going to be okay.”
“My bosses . . .” She wheezed in a breath. “My bosses are here. My relatives. Friends. Even my hairdresser. I’m going to have to leave town. No one will ever speak to me again. I’ll be fired and who will hire me when they find out about”—she waved a hand in the air—“this?”
“It’s art.” Parvati yanked her up by the collar. “Get a grip. People are watching. They’re looking to you to see how to react. Pretend it’s all good, that you knew what was coming. If you aren’t surprised, they’ll think it’s okay.”
Zara straightened, her vision immediately assailed by a six-foot painting of a pomegranate dripping with cream. “He’s my dad,” she moaned. “I can handle dad dances or dad jokes or even dad jeans. This is all the dad humiliations on Earth rolled into one.”
“Isn’t it incredible!” Indra joined them, her voice lowered to a whisper. “The silence in the room says everything. They are in that moment of total submersion when words fail them. The patriarchy has been challenged today. We have reclaimed ourselves, our femininity, our very essence . . .”
“My dad painted these,” Zara pointed out. “He’s a man.”
“Your father understands women in a way few men do,” Indra said. “It really is quite remarkable.”
“Why does this always happen to me?” she asked Parvati after Indra breezed away to speak to someone who was examining the price tag beside the peach. “Why can’t I have a nice normal life? Why is it always chaos and disaster and . . .” She waved vaguely at the walls. “Vulva fruits?”
“Because you’re the kind of person who takes risks.” Parvati turned slowly, taking in the room. “And because you have a big heart. A normal person wouldn’t have invited everyone they knew to the gallery when they hadn’t seen the paintings, especially with your father’s history.”