Chapter 21 Lily #2
“That’s what I don’t know!” I slammed my hand on the bar, and the man next to me turned to look at us.
I lowered my voice. “I knew something weird was going on. Ramona and I had met up again to talk about her work, and I was talking about Matthew and she just had this look on her face, like she couldn’t even keep back how much she disliked him.
So I asked her, and she said he seemed entitled.
Arrogant. Which, yeah, he was. Is. He is. ”
“I don’t understand,” Clara said.
“Neither do I. That’s part of it. All I know is that the next thing is my boss, who represents Matthew’s work, tells me that he doesn’t want me working on Matthew’s show because of our personal relationship.
Fine—fair enough. Philip Louis dated clients and it always fucked things up, but he ran the gallery so it was different for him.
So I don’t know anything about the show and Matthew was always really secretive about his work, especially when it was going well.
Superstition or whatever, and for a long time I found that really charming, so I respected it, gave him space.
The night the show opens, I get to his studio, which is in this giant warehouse in Bushwick—that’s this sort of gritty neighborhood in Brooklyn, so ugly that people think it’s cool—and there’s a crowd of people there, and this energy, a tingle of something, about the way people are looking at me.
And I feel like I’m being paranoid or wonder if it’s sort of, you know, nice attention.
Like, oh, there’s his girlfriend, she’s so lovely, rising star, blah blah blah.
” Even in this open, unfiltered mode I felt embarrassed to admit that—that I had wanted to be admired.
Craved it enough that I was willing to ignore the feeling of low-grade dread tugging at me, telegraphing that I should be wary. That something was off.
“You needed to listen to your intuition.” Clara tapped her forehead to indicate her third eye. “Seriously. I don’t even believe in all of that psychobabble stuff and I’m a psychic, but I’m telling you. Trust yourself more. Anyway, keep going.”
“So the show, I find out, is comprised of two artists’ works. And the other artist is …”
Clara leaned in even closer, her knee touching mine, her hand on my wrist. “That bitch Ramona!” For a second I remembered just how young she was. How, when I was her age, my friends and I were riding our bikes to the Wawa and pooling our money to buy a milkshake to split.
I gave her the rest of the story in the most straightforward way I could muster, and it still felt muddled and strange.
The first piece I saw at the show was a single canvas tacked to the wall, unframed, ragged at the edges.
There was a streak of green paint at the top and several more below it, seven in total.
The first six streaks were various greens: pine, emerald, bottle-green, seafoam.
Someone had penciled letters next to each stripe.
R, R, R, R, R, R, and M. The last streak, marked with the M, had much more yellow than the others, more of a chartreuse.
In the next room, I saw a painting on the wall: a girl curled up in a wing chair, wearing a dress that was the same color as the last slash of green on the canvas.
She was looking across the room at something, unaware of the viewer.
It was a well-executed painting but restrained compared to Ramona’s newer work, mannered and too careful.
Not good enough to be shown with Matthew’s sculptures, and not what I had expected from her at all.
In the next room: one of Matthew’s sculptures, small for him, delicate even.
Oh no, I had thought. What had happened?
He always called that kind of work timid.
More like toymaking than art. A placard on the wall said The Flame.
As far as I could tell it was abstract, made from peels of metal welded into a fan shape.
I tried to read the negative space but nothing emerged for me.
People around me were nodding. What? I wanted to ask.
What did they see that I couldn’t? Around the corner, another small sculpture.
It had the fluidity of Matthew’s larger works—it was called The Idea, and it looked to me like smoke—but again, the scale was disappointing.
A photographer came around the corner and took my photo, and for a moment the brightness of his flashbulb left stars in my eyes.
I saw that photo run somewhere else later, I couldn’t remember where, but my eyebrows were knit together, like a disapproving schoolmarm’s.
Temporary walls sectioned off the warehouse space.
They were genius for building tension, having the viewer wind through that maze; meaning, wholeness felt just around the corner, but all I could feel was frustration.
Matthew told me once that I was his muse, but I had yet to see myself in any of his pieces.
I wondered what Ramona was up to, too, going behind my back to Philip Louis, or to Matthew, or however it had happened. I pulled out my phone and texted her.
Why didn’t you talk to me about this???
I rounded the next corner and was shocked to see, mounted on the brick wall, a photograph of Ramona and me, blown up very large, five by four feet.
I realized quickly that it had to have been taken through the window of the wine bar where I had met her in Alphabet City—I remembered Ramona’s outfit.
We were both reaching for the check, but you couldn’t see our tabletop, so in the picture it looked like we were holding hands.
But who would have taken it? And why? Neither Matthew nor Ramona even worked in photographs.
I looked closer but didn’t understand until I backed away.
There was Matthew’s face, reflected in the glass, imposed over us both.
Matthew, answer me! What is this?
I nearly tripped rounding the next corner, pushing past people, even stepping on someone’s toes.
A painter and his wife were looking at a series of Matthew’s sculptures, six in total.
They seemed to be in pairs. The first was called Lily I, the second, Ramona I Lily I was tall, nearly nine feet if I had to guess.
Ramona I was three feet. You hardly noticed her at all.
In the next sculptures, Lily II and Ramona II, Lily was perhaps a little shorter, Ramona about the size she was in real life—five and a half feet tall.
And by the third, the sequence had established a victor: Lily III was six feet tall, and Ramona III had grown to seven.
My hands were shaking as I typed out another message to Matthew.
Where are you? Is this a joke?
We need to talk. NOW.
Someone looked at their phone and laughed. And yet I still didn’t understand the extent of the show, its depth, its scope.
Then the sound of static crackled through speakers—had they installed a PA system for this?
—followed by a rustling noise. Then, a moan.
A man’s. A woman’s. Mine. Matthew’s. He had recorded us in bed.
And then, a third voice. Lower pitched, sort of a growl.
Matthew groaning. You like that? Ramona.
And there we were, the three of us, dubbed together, becoming louder, orgasms harmonizing.
I covered my ears, but I could still hear everything.
When it was over, reduced to a series of breathy pants, a giggle, the smack of a kiss, the track started over again. I thought I was going to throw up.
The walls finally opened into a large space at the back of the studio, where a screen showed the feed, in real time, of all the messages I had sent to Matthew that night.
Next to it was another screen that showed the photos that had been taken since my arrival: me wringing my hands, me frowning at the young girl who had been assigned to stand with me in the lobby, Ramona and me—she looking completely composed while I looked angry, drunk, my eyeliner smeared, my eyes shining.
There was another framed piece full of letters—letters!
—that Ramona had sent to Matthew. The painting Ramona had done of Matthew, her first male subject as far as I knew, was large enough to fill ten feet of the west wall.
He was naked except for a necklace I had seen Ramona wear a few times, a Saint Agatha medal on a piece of leather cord.
I felt my knees give, and I threatened to fold in on myself right there, like an injured deer.
Then, I heard a laugh. Matthew’s laugh.
They were standing together at the end of the room, Ramona and Matthew, their backs turned to me, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Ramona was the first one to feel my stare, and she turned, the corners of her mouth ticking up in a smile.
“What the hell!” I shouted at them, slipping again in my shoes.
I was vaguely aware of a photographer’s bulb flashing at the corner of my eyes, but I couldn’t think about him, about anything else other than my need to scream, to demand an explanation, to feel someone seize my shoulders and find myself home in our bed, waking up from a dream.
The man they were speaking with edged away when he saw me approach, touching Matthew on the elbow, mouthing that he would call.
“Lil.”
“Don’t ‘Lil’ me.” He held out his hands like I might charge him. His hair fell in his eyes like it had the first night we met. I loved him, I hated him. I wanted to ruin him, but I would have let him put me in a cab and take me home if he put his arm around me in the right way.
“This is disgusting, Matthew. How did this even happen?” I was spitting the words between gritted teeth. “You two weren’t supposed to see each other. You were never supposed to meet. That recording? When the fuck did you record us having sex?”