Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [53]
There was one problem: I didn’t have a boyfriend. I’d broken up with the poor guy I’d been tormenting during my senior year in high school, and now I didn’t know anyone at all.
Then one afternoon, a week or two in, I took the bus by myself to an art show off campus. This wasn’t intended as an expedition to ferret out boyfriend candidates; I was mainly excited about the possibilities of going places by myself without first having to bust through a roadblock of parents with curled lips and raised eyebrows. What a relief it was not to have to explain to anyone when I would be back.
The art show was held in a communal house that had been rented by a group of grad students. It didn’t look like any art show I’d been to before: large, unframed airbrushed paintings with staples sticking out of gessoed edges hung on the dirty walls of a living room so underfurnished its occupants appeared to have been recently evicted. To me this meant only one thing: the people living there were too smart to get hung up on mundane middle-class bullshit like furniture. Why bother with chairs and end tables if you had a dozen photo-realist paintings of pasty bourgeois people floating in swimming pools?
When I walked in, wearing my navy peacoat and my green felt hat with the leopard-print band, a couple of guys my age immediately began to circle me. The first one had followed me in from the bus stop. He wasn’t bad-looking: curly brown afro, Benjamin Franklin glasses, a blue work shirt. But he was quickly disqualified for appearing to be a little too happy to meet me. He smiled too much, he was too familiar, too touchy-feely. In a flash I could visualize this overly enthusiastic, far too ardent stranger whaling away on top of me, grimacing and thrashing as he expelled giants bullets of sweat like a drawing by S. Clay Wilson. The second guy had long blondish hair, wide-wale corduroy pants, and suede cowboy boots. As superficial signifiers went, this was a hat trick. More important, he was aloof, with an edge that seemed somehow threatening. That he was an upperclassman art major from my very department and willing to talk to me made me feel like an insider!
I didn’t think he was “cute” per se; he was smallish, skinny, and sort of pigeon-chested. But from my perspective, he loomed much larger, held aloft by the immensity of his arrogant disregard for everything. That frosty, unpleasant air of his told me that he was a person of high standards. We had all let him down. Hopefully I would prove the rare exception.
I began following him around the exhibit like an orphaned baby duck, noting how he rolled his eyes at the same paintings that had minutes before impressed me with their details and airbrush techniques.
“This is bullshit,” he said, with a sweeping hand gesture that applied across the board. “Guy’s an asshole. A punk.”
I nodded my head in deference.
From that point on, I tried to make all my comments both vague and dismissive, in the hopes that if they were wrong, they might still seem to contain a hidden, much smarter second meaning.
His name was Brad, and he was so thoroughly unimpressed by the art in this exhibit that he was ready to leave the moment he arrived. “Go get a hot dog?” he asked, tilting his head toward the door before completing even one full lap around the room. I nodded and tagged along behind him as he headed down the block. At first I was a little bit concerned because I was a vegetarian. But it turned out that this dietary restriction of mine was less of a problem than I’d anticipated since at no point did Brad offer to buy me any food. Instead I stood beside him in the small chalet-style fast-food establishment and watched