Tear You Apart

“Yes. I’m sure of it. Naveen wouldn’t have priced it if he didn’t think he could sell it.” I slant the man a sideways look, wishing I could be bold enough to stare at him when he’s facing me, the way I was when he was looking at something else.

“Good. I need to pay my rent. A coupla hundred bucks would be sweet.”

Of course he’s an artist. Men who look like that, in a place like this—they’re always artists. Usually starving. He looks lean enough to have missed a few meals. Standing this close I get a whiff of cigarettes and corduroy, which should make no sense, since he’s not wearing any, but it does because that’s how I work. Tastes and smells and sounds link up for me in ways they don’t for everyone else. I see colors where there shouldn’t be any. The scent of corduroy is par for the course.

“You took that picture?”

“I did.” He nods, not without pride, despite what he’d been saying about it earlier.

If he’d been talking shit about another artist’s piece I’d have liked him less, even if he was telling the truth. I can like him better now. “It’s really not so bad.”

He frowns. Shakes his head. “You’re a bad liar.”

On the contrary, I think I’m an excellent liar.

He looks again at the picture and shrugs. “Someone will buy it because it looks like art but doesn’t ask too much of them. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the expert.” He shrugs again and crosses one arm over his chest to rest his elbow on as he stares at the photo. I don’t miss the stance—it’s a mirror of my own. He bites at his thumb. It must be an old habit, because the nail is ragged. “The only reason I did this thing was for Naveen, you know? He said he wanted something more commercial. Not, like, doll heads with pencil stubs sticking out of the eye holes and stuff like that.”

I’m a good liar, but not a good poker player. I can’t keep a stone face. I know the piece he’s talking about. It’s been in the back room of Naveen’s Philadelphia gallery for months, if not years. Of course I assumed he couldn’t sell it, which didn’t explain why he kept it hung back there for so long. I joked with him that he kept it for some sentimental reasons; maybe this was true.

“That was yours?”

He laughs. “Will Roberts.”

I take the hand he holds out. His fingers are callused and rough, and for a moment I imagine how they’d sound against something silk, like a scarf. His touch would rasp on something soft. It would whisper.

“Elisabeth Amblin.”

His fingers curl around mine. For one bizarre second, I’m sure he’s going to kiss the back of my hand. I tense, waiting for the brush of his mouth against my skin, the wet slide of his tongue on my flesh, and that’s ridiculous because of course he wouldn’t do such a thing. People don’t do that to strangers. Even lovers would hardly do so.

My imagination is wild, I know it, yet when he lets my hand drop I’m still a little disappointed. His touch lingers, the way his fingers scraped at mine. I’m not soft as silk, no matter how many expensive creams I rub into my skin. And yet, I’d been right. His touch whispered.

“You’re Naveen’s friend.”

“Yeah. You could say that. We have sort of a love-hate thing going on.” I pause, judging his reaction. “He loves that I work for next to nothing, and I hate that he doesn’t pay me more.”

Will laughs. It ripples in streams of blue and green that wink into sparkling gold. His eyes squint shut. He has straight white teeth in a thin-lipped mouth. He shouldn’t be attractive in his laughter, the way it changes his face, but there’s something infectious about him. I laugh, too.

There’s music in the gallery, a string quartet in the corner painfully strumming their way through Pachelbel’s Canon and Für Elise. They must be students, because Naveen would never have paid for professional musicians. I wonder which one of them he used to fuck, because like that painting in the back room and other things here in the gallery, including me, Naveen hangs on to things for sentimental reasons. There’s food in the gallery, too, a little lackluster. And there’s wine. But there isn’t much laughter, and we draw attention.

Will tips his head back for a few more chuckles, then looks at me. “I’m supposed to go mingle.”

I want him to linger. I want to keep him from something he should be doing but chooses not to because of me. And I could make him stay, I think suddenly, watching his gaze skip and slide over my body, my damp clothes, my bare legs. He’s already touched my skin. He knows how I feel. I want him to want to know more.

“Sure, go.” I tip my chin toward the rest of the room. “I have some things I need to do, too.”

I am a good liar.

“It was nice meeting you, Elisabeth.” Will holds out his hand again.

This time I entertain no fantasies of his lips on the back of it. That’s just silly. We shake formally. Firmly. I turn away from him at the end of it, feigning interest again in his piece-of-shit-that-isn’t-art, so I don’t have to watch him walking away.

Naveen finds me in front of a few pieces of pottery on their narrow pedestals. I don’t like them. Technically, they’re lovely. They are commercial. They will sell. What’s good for the gallery is good for me. Still, they reek of manure. Maybe it’s the mud they’re made from. Maybe it’s just the twisted signals in my brain that layer and mingle my senses. Whatever it is, I’m staring with a frown when my friend puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close.

“I already have several more commissioned from this artist. Lacey Johnsbury.” Naveen’s grin is very white. He smells of a subtle blend of expensive cologne and the pomade he uses in his jet-black hair. Those are actual scents; anyone could smell them.

When Naveen speaks, I taste cotton candy, soft and sweet, subtle. There are times when listening to my friend talk makes my teeth ache. But I like the taste of cotton candy, just as I like listening to Naveen, because we’ve been friends for a long, long time. He might be one of the only people who know me as well as I know myself. Sometimes maybe better. I run my tongue along my teeth for a second before I answer him.

“I don’t like them.”

“You don’t have to like them, darling, they are not for you.”

I shrug. “It’s your gallery.”

“Yes.” Those white teeth, that grin. “And they’ll sell. I like things that sell, Elisabeth. You know that.”

“Like that?” I nod toward Will’s atrocity.

“You don’t like that, either?”

I shrug again. “It’s a piece of shit, Naveen. Even the artist thinks so.”

He laughs, and I’m in front of a Ferris wheel under a summer sky, my hair in pigtails and my fists full of spun sugar. Not really, of course, but that’s how it feels. “You met Will.”

“Yes. I met him.” I look for Will in the crowd and see him in one of the alcoves, flirting with a woman whose hair is not flat and limp, her lipstick unsmeared. She looks as if she hasn’t eaten in years. She leans in close to him. He laughs.

I hate her.

I look away before Naveen can see me watching, but it’s too late. He shakes his head and squeezes my shoulder gently. He doesn’t say anything. I guess he doesn’t have to. Someone calls his name, and he’s off to schmooze. He’s better at it than I am, so I leave him to it.

It’s late and getting later, and I should leave. Naveen offered to let me stay at his place. I’ve done it before. I like his wife, Puja, but their kids are still small. When I stay there I’m treated to lots of sticky hugs and kisses, am woken at the crack of dawn and feel as if I have to give Puja a hand with things like diapers and feeding times. My daughters are long beyond needing that sort of care, and I don’t miss it.

“You’re still here.”

I turn, the sound of his voice tiptoeing up my spine to tickle the back of my neck. “I am.”

Will tilts his head a little to look at me. “Do you like anything in this show?”

“Of course I do.” It would be disloyal to say otherwise, wouldn’t it?

“Show me.”

I’m caught. At a loss. I search the room for something I do like. I point. “There. That piece. I like that one.”

White canvas, black stripes. A red circle. It looks like something any elementary schoolkid could do, but somehow it’s art because of the way it’s framed and hangs on the wall. When I look at it, I see the hovering shapes of butterflies, just for a minute. Nobody else would; they’d just see the white, the black, the red. But it’s the butterflies that make me choose it. I don’t love it, but out of everything here tonight, I like it the best.