Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [117]
DON’T WORRY. I WASHED IT. XO, HOPE.
She came home just to drop this off before heading back to the studio. Hope had probably wanted to hand deliver it to me in person. I must have missed her by only a few minutes.
Now, this scene could have been more dramatic if I had been wearing the red ME, YES, ME T-shirt I retrieved from the MOM AND DAD box on Sunday afternoon, the one you had customized for me to wear underneath my high school graduation gown all those years ago. It would have been a hugely symbolic gesture, slipping off the garment that you made for me, yes, me and putting on the hopeweaver original, representing my choice of one of you over the other. But the ME, YES, ME T-shirt is still neatly folded among all the other archives I had returned to the cardboard box.
Back in high school, I always said that I wanted a boyfriend who was “the male equivalent of Hope.” Would I have ever loved you if my love for Hope hadn’t come first? Would I have ever loved you if Hope hadn’t left? Would you have loved Hope if she had stayed? If Heath had lived?
I know. Just so many more unanswerable counterfactuals.
seventy-one
I don’t know my way around the winding, one-way, dead-ending streets of the Financial District, so I had trouble finding the office building on Maiden Lane that was temporarily servicing as studio and exhibition space for Hope and her fellow artists. Other floors in the same building are being used as rehearsal rooms, so I got into an elevator packed with a taciturn, pasty-faced musician lugging a dented black case with a bell-shaped bottom for a large brass instrument, a ballet dancer with perfect penguin-waddle turnout shouldering a gym bag and smelling of eucalyptus sore-muscle salve, and two actors discussing audition reels and stints on soap operas who would be wincingly beautiful anywhere else in the world but here are just another waitress and bartender barely worth a second glance. These people wouldn’t know NASDAQ from NASCAR, and I couldn’t help but note the irony of the city’s last bohemians infiltrating the realm of the ruling class, that is, until some mogul buys the building and boots them all out.
The doors opened at the fourth floor and I was surprised when everyone in the elevator got out with me for Hope’s exhibition. This was not one of those spotless all-white boutique galleries you’d find in Chelsea. Nor was it one of those gritty, abandoned warehouses found in one of the last blighted stretches of industrial waterfront. Imagine a typical office floor where the unglamorous but necessary work is done. The accounts payable department, perhaps. Think gray walls, gray industrial carpeting, twitchy fluorescent lighting affecting a gray pallor on the cursed cubicle dwellers who review the expense reports and cut the paychecks of those being compensated far more generously than they are.
Hope shares this swing space with two other female artists. One’s medium was “suspended sculpture.” Her installation was titled “Cuntfight,” and I will try to explain it as best I can. It consisted of female mannequins dipped in primary-colored waxes, then covered in white feathers. These figures were then arranged in twos, striking various battle poses—a headlock, a foot-to-groin, a fist-to-the-face—inside chicken coops that hung from the ceiling via a system of high-tension wires. I know there is no ideal way to die, but death by inadequately tethered suspended sculpture is not the demise I had in mind. I avoided walking underneath the cages.
The second artist worked with “found textiles.” She created quilts made entirely out of objects scavenged from the garbage, each work titled after the corporate receptacles from which the materials had been retrieved. Kmart #3, for example.