Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [119]
“Of course I’m here,” I replied. “I couldn’t miss your big Manhattan debut.”
“It’s not so big,” she said, hunching up her shoulders shyly.
Just then an antic guy in a fur trapper hat crashed through our conversation.
“Are you the artist?” he asked.
Her eyes flitted to the floor. “Yes, I am.”
“I fucking love your aesthetic,” he said in all earnestness.
“Thank you,” Hope said politely.
And then Trapper Hat proceeded to talk more with his hands than with his mouth about Truth and Beauty and Art without making much sense at all. While he jabbered, I turned back to the wall and tried to figure out how she had done it. I was as baffled by these paintings as I had been by the process that had transformed hundreds of colorful paper slivers into the mosaic of two smiling thirteen-year-olds.
Hope slipped beside me. “Oh, man, I thought he’d never stop,” she said, glancing over her shoulder nervously, worrying that he might come back after he refilled his plastic wine cup.
“How did you turn those pictures into these paintings?” I asked. “Or would knowing how you did it ruin the effect?”
She relaxed a bit. “Of course I can tell you.” And then she went on to explain how she scanned her favorite found photographs, then edited them via PhotoShop, zooming in and cropping out however she saw fit. She blew up the reworked image, now a blurry fragment of the original, and affixed that new print to her canvas. Finally she painted over the whole thing with oils.
“I—” she began, before being interrupted by yet another fan of her work.
“Combine the past with the present in medium and message, both restoring history and reinventing it,” whispered a wraithlike stranger in a suit of black leather who was lurking behind us.
“Er, right,” Hope said nervously before grabbing me by the elbow. “I combine the past with the present in medium and message, both restoring history and reinventing it,” she said in a mocking singsong as she encouraged me to move across the room. “It sounds so pretentious….”
“Don’t apologize. I was just thinking about how much of my past resonates in my present. I certainly have a hard time letting go.”
“Maybe the past doesn’t want to let go of you.” I glimpsed Hope’s fragile eggshell face, then quickly returned my attention to her work, which was infinitely easier to focus on.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “Your paintings are like…” I grasped for a fitting way to describe the feelings these pictures evoked.
“David Hockney meets Diane Arbus,” offered a third stranger, one whose dyed-black asymmetrical bangs were cut right across his eyes, concealing half of his view.
Hope ignored him. “It’s like…getting caught up in someone else’s memories,” she said dreamily.
“Exactly,” I concurred.
And then the tears tore up her face.
“Jess,” she said. “I am so sorry….”
“Don’t cry,” I said. “You’ll mess up your makeup.”
But it was already too late. Dirty rivulets of mascara were already staining her porcelain skin. Hope is a loud, messy crier.
“I’M SO SORRY…,” she blubbered. I lunged for a hug. This is not something Hope and I usually do. We are not huggers.
“We don’t need to have this conversation,” I said, pressing my face into the back of her neck. She smelled of ginger shampoo and lavender oil; the latter, she had told me, is used as an inoffensive paint-thinning substitute for turpentine.
“But I want to tell you…”
“We don’t need to have this conversation,” I repeated firmly. “It doesn’t matter.”
Hope loosened her grip on me, so I could reel back and look her in the face. Her complexion was ashen, her eyes wide and petrified that another overly familiar stranger would bust in on our discussion to expound on her work’s Depth and Profundity.
“Let’s get you out of here,” I urged.
I had expected Hope to protest. After all, she had been working on “(Re)Collection” so hard and for so long at the expense of food, sleep, fun, and sanity, and goddammit, tonight was the time to celebrate. But she immediately brightened at my suggestion.
“I was hoping you would say that,” she said, unleashing a gust