Chapter 21 Lily #3
“Lily.” He braced me by the shoulders, turned me away from where a circle of people had gathered to watch us. “Listen to me, would you? Before anything else happens. We did this for you. Ramona and I. For all of us.”
“For me? What part of this is for me? Please, tell me how that works. I’d love to hear you rationalize that.”
He lowered his voice, and now he was whispering. “Everyone in the city is going to be talking about this show, writing about it. And who represents Ramona Avalon?”
“Hell if I know.”
“No, Lily. She’s your client. She wants to work with you.”
“Well, she probably shouldn’t have fucked my boyfriend then.”
“I’m telling you, Lily.” He picked up my hand, pressed his fingers into my palm. “First of all—it’s fake, okay?”
“Doesn’t sound so fake to me. You moaning her goddamned name sounds pretty real.”
“Lily. The sex, it happened, okay? But it’s just a means to an end. I’m telling you. This will make your career. You didn’t want to be a gallery girl anymore? Guess what? You’ve got the attention of everyone in town. You’ve got more control than you think.”
“Control? I’m a pawn! You turned me into a spectacle? Cheated on me? You’re broadcasting what I sound like in bed? If you think anyone can respect me after this, you’re absolutely insane. And if this is supposed to help me, why couldn’t I be in on it?”
“You know that wouldn’t work—it needed to be authentic, raw! Lily, you of all people should appreciate this. We made art out of normal life. This stuff happens all of the time—people messing around on one another. It’s just acting. Really. No genuine feelings exchanged.”
Ramona had broken away from a group of buyers and edged against my side, between Matthew and me, whispering in my ear. “We talk about this stuff all the time, Lil. How people crave stories more than anything else. We just gave them that.”
There was one brief moment when I stopped to consider whether they might be right. Whether I could intellectualize this away. How much easier everything would be if I accepted their reasoning. It was so tempting, to pretend it might actually be okay.
“I was trying to help you,” I said to Ramona. My voice had dipped into another register, one below the anger. I sounded sad and shaky and small. “I cared about your work.”
Philip Louis pulled Matthew away and the two of them leaned together, whispering and looking in my direction.
“You’re angry. I know. But Lily,” she said, “he will tell you one thing about all this, and let me tell you another. You need to be free of him. His name. What about you? What about your name?”
“What are you talking about?” I spat.
“It will feel good, to take something from him. Admit it. To take some of that success for us, to use it to our advantage. Whatever he says, the way I look at it, this show was about you and me, about the conversations we had about our work, our goals. We will be unstoppable after this. We will leave him in the dust.” Her lips were so close that they brushed my ear.
She looked down to where my hand was clamped around her wrist, looked back up at me.
I didn’t care that she might be right about Matthew. I let go.
I shouldered my way between them, slipping out of my shoes as I walked.
One of the shoes slid off my foot. I kicked the other off with a grunt and stopped to pick them up.
I could hear that awful tape still running: me and Matthew and Ramona orgasming together.
I looked up to see that painting of Matthew, that smug smile on his face, like he could see me coming.
Like he’d seen me falling apart, since the moment he posed.
I swung one of the shoes at the canvas, the heel catching in Matthew’s painted neck.
Behind me I heard the sounds of people gasping, some cheering.
I got one more swing in, this time ripping Matthew straight through the chest, before two men grabbed my arms and led me away. “I left the next morning.”
“Lily,” Clara said. “That’s insane.”
“I know. I still don’t know whose version of things to trust.” It had felt good to tell someone the whole story, to unload.
Clara, unlikely as it was, seemed like the right person for it.
She didn’t have Emily’s ruthless, withering judgment.
She wasn’t going to weep with sympathy the way, say, my mother would.
I had managed to hold it together as I spoke, but I could feel that familiar lump forming at the base of my throat.
But I told myself it would be insane to cry in front of Clara.
Clara, the teenager with cigarette marks on her fingers.
“How about neither of them? Those two both sound like psychos.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“So why do you still want him?”
“It’s not even that I still want him, exactly.
I know I can’t go back to the way things were.
But when we were together, I just kept thinking that my life would be better with him, more exciting, more interesting than it could ever be on my own.
” It was the most honest I had ever been about Matthew.
I was always sure that his life would be better than mine, and that the best thing I could do was stick around for the ride.
“Yeah, you’ll never know when he’s about to cheat on you with one of your friends.”
“It wasn’t cheating, exactly.”
“I don’t care what you say or what they say. That’s not art. What about your life? Why can’t that be an adventure? Why can’t you be that person to someone? Instead you’re just going to attach yourself to this asshole like a … like a barnacle.”
“I’m not a barnacle!” Though I might have been offended, it only made me laugh. Soon, mostly without reason, we were both laughing, tears at the corners of our eyes.
“Excuse me,” a man’s voice said from behind us. “But you ladies mind if I sit down with you?”
I watched Clara’s face shift again, the oversweet smile, the shift in her posture, the crossing of her legs.
“Well, it’ll cost you,” Clara said, changing her voice so that it was syrupy sweet.
That quickly, I thought. She tipped her chin down so that she was staring up at him through her eyelashes. “One drink each.”
“Clara,” I said, my voice low, a warning. She gave me a look that I had seen before: regret for the way things were, and that I was too blind, too sheltered, to possibly understand.