The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [13]
“If she’d been wearing this,” he says, tapping the sketch with the red pencil, “he would’ve stopped. Anyone would’ve stopped. A whole crowd would’ve gathered.”
She pictures the crowd peering downward tentatively, an odd moment of suddenly not quite trusting the ground.
“And then an old woman would’ve taken a spool of thread from her purse,” he enthuses. “And a teenage boy would’ve taken a piece of gum out of his mouth. And working together they all would’ve gotten that pearl back for her.”
Ursula sees the event happen as he describes it. It takes about half a minute, the length of any commercial. She is half inclined to go out and buy a purple Indian-print silk tunic or a pack of chewing gum. The other half of her is annoyed at the first for being so easily sold.
“That’s the kind of world people deserve,” he reflects.
“People deserve a world where it wouldn’t have mattered what the woman was wearing,” she says. “Where people would have stopped to help her anyway.”
“But beauty can inspire people to be better. Beauty . . .” He pauses to shade in the ground around the figure of the woman, tilting his head as he draws, thinking, nodding to himself. “Beauty is the PR campaign of the human soul.”
He continues smiling as he sketches a few rising squiggles that transform the buildings behind the leggy, crouching woman into a whimsical print pattern. For a moment Ursula is drawn into the calming geometry of his sketch, and then she’s back in her own body, conscious of her own appearance, her flushed face, the smell of her sweat. How easy it is for men to talk about beauty, and how subtly intimidating when they do.
“That’s where we come in,” he goes on, shading in the air. “That’s our job, Ursula. To give people the beauty they deserve. And from the beauty they deserve will come the love they deserve. And from love will follow truth.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” she asks, squinting at his face against the afternoon sun.
“Sure. Probably. Maybe, anyway.” His overlarge, scruffy head blots out the sun when he turns to her, making visible his sad, crooked-toothed smile. “Meanwhile, beauty alone will just have to do, right?”
The question hovers between them. She wants to say no. But his tender eyes and lopsided cross section of teeth make her think just maybe. She laughs, and Javier shrugs and looks at his drawing again, amused as well.
Postirony
. . . Find the future, Chas Lacouture said, leaning back in his chair and allowing Ursula the view, the cloud-capped spires and fog-stockinged spindles of Middle City in breathtaking disarray all the way down the mountain’s face, bending and arching and standing on tippytoes, a troupe of colossal robot ballerinas prepping for showtime. And in that moment she felt as though she might do just that, she might venture into the streets of her brand-new home and find the future there waiting for her like an outfit in a window display, and it would be as easy as that: new outfit, new career, new life. She hadn’t known she’d give up on trying to be an artist after she moved here—a real artist, she had thought, whether idealistically or snobbishly, she’s no longer sure, not just a commercial artist—but she must have secretly been hoping she would, hoping she could give up, otherwise why would she now feel so little regret and so much relief? Her foray into the world of art had been a serious miscalculation, a boondoggle, her own personal Somalia, an effort to save a seething mass