The Encounter

“I didn’t understand it. Not entirely. But that’s part of why I loved it,” Maurice said after the reading’s Q&A. We had just visited the refreshment table and regrouped in a little circle near the white folding chairs. 

During the reading, some pieces of my life had snapped into place, not just with one another, but also with something bigger than me. It was the coalescing of a web of friends, of art, of my look, of our look and feel as a group into a home from which we could all radiate. I glanced around our little circle, tipping into love over our shared devotion to fashion as art: Ché’s entomologically-themed Rorschach velvet leggings, Maurice’s kaftan of brilliant reds that we jokingly named the murder-smock, Ian’s oak-framed glasses with rose-tinted lenses, and Lavonna’s towering hair. We had ideas, we had projects, we were all becoming something, but we couldn’t and needn’t name it yet. In place of conviction, we explored everything, absolutely everything, with ardor. And this seemed to us the pinnacle of existence, to be endlessly collapsing with fervor. 

“Being pushed,” Lavonna nodded at Maurice, responding to the reading.   

“Yes,” I added, also nodding.  

“The text—the words, rather—don’t need to—and perhaps shouldn’t?—totally approximate the work.” Maurice brushed away a trickle of shortbread crumbs that clung to the front of his kaftan, being careful not to spill red wine from his little plastic cup. Though it might not have mattered, as the red hues were similar. 

“Leave space,” Ché said, her eyes looking beyond us, sinking into a painting over my shoulder. Then she took a sip of wine. 

“Exactly,” said Ian, also sipping his wine. He was blinking repeatedly, which he tended to do when sorting his way through ideas. “The best answers bring questions.” 

“Questionnnnnnns.” Maurice flared his eyes and brought his lips together in simmering excitement. “Who’s first?” 

“I’ve got, like, five—just to start,” declared Ché, turning one leg outward, resting her free hand on her hip, as she did when she meant business. “First off, color. Right?” 

And so we interrogated color, bubbling into questions over our first cups of wine. And from those questions, hatched new ones that begot new ones yet. We exercised our vocabularies and nascent ideas. We nudged overdetermined words into our circle, floated them like boats on our conversational current, stoked further by the unexpected courses they took. Panopticon and consent and affect and materiality. Berlant and Lacan and Abramoviç. We riffed until we were ruddy and parched and humming with ideas, then, just as naturally as we had come together, we fanned out within the gallery. 

Moving through the high-ceilinged space amongst hushed whispers, we entered that existentially vacuous phase of ponderous pauses: the crawling, searching, almost-there but not-going-to-get-quite-there feeling of absorbing art. Perhaps to diffuse this unsustainable jouissance-like feeling, we were all looking at one another as much as at the art. We were living art, through the paintings in this opening and through each other. I felt it more then than I had in a while.  

Is it possible to live art even through a stranger? In my heightened state, I meandered into the orbit of a man who looked vaguely like a prince. He was tall and shockingly thin, with skin so pale and features so angular they appeared etched into alabaster. This prince could not have had enough heft to his sinew to even lift himself up onto a horse but—and wasn’t that the beauty of it?—one could absolutely imagine him riding a horse, his just-shy-of-shoulder-length black hair dancing in the breeze as he galloped…somewhere. This notion was less because of his boots—which could have been street or ranch or dance, with their leather, their pointed tips and thin but sturdy-looking wooden soles—and more because of the subtle prince-like billow of his white shirt near the wrists. And because of his gray suede vest. His hair was a beautiful inky black that shined like oil under moonlight.  

I worried he might think I was trying to end up next to him, which I wasn’t, though I didn’t mind.  

“Hello,” he said to me, nodding with effort, as though saying hello was both a feat for him and a gift for me. His first move told me a story of how difficult he found it to talk to people. And yet his manner was also self-effacing, and I was a sucker for that. Though people spoke of how even self-effacement was an affectation. But where do they begin and where do they end, these affectations? I had asked that very night to my group before the reading, worrying if my posture while asking it was also an affectation. And is that why people stood so blandly and slumpily? To avoid being accused of affectation? And didn’t that just become its own affectation? It was all incredibly exhausting. But then I was shot though again with the image of the frail prince riding a horse and regrouped. 

“Hi,” I said. “I like your…shirt.” 

He nodded as if this comment was expected, and I felt a fleeting concern that I had chosen the wrong article to compliment. But then he finally said, “Thanks.” 

He paused, seeming to take me in, which led me to self-consciously smooth my skirt, even though it was not a skirt to be smoothed but more of a crepe, and then he turned to the piece before us, one I was not familiar with, and said, “These works are new.” 

I waited because I thought he was going to say more. But he didn’t. And I wondered, did he mean new to the gallery—which they were, but which was also extremely obvious, as the event was an opening, as obvious as saying, We are in a gallery or I am wearing boots—or did he mean this in some kind of high theory way? I assumed it had to be the latter, and that I was maybe unprepared for the conversation but lucky for the opportunity to have it. I fumbled for the right response, aware of the seconds ticking by. “So new,” I hummed, staring deep into the corners of it, where the black and white burst into colors.  

“It’s an essence, you know?” he said, turning back toward me. 

I nodded. Wanting out of this slippery realm, I lunged for something concrete. “What’s your connection to the gallery? Do you come here often?” No! I felt my cheeks flush. 

He stifled a laugh. “I do, in fact. I had some pieces showing here last month. I was in London so there wasn’t an opening or anything.” 

“Oh.” I was stunned. 

“Sorry, I’m Elijah.” With the slightest shrug of humility, he smiled and extended a slender hand. Left hand, no rings, just a thin gold wrist cuff.  

“Claire.” I smiled, my mind spinning in its search for any Elijah I should know.  

“How about you?” He graciously steered away from his work. “What’s your medium, or are you just a lover of art? Forgive me but I feel that you move like an artist.”  

I cocked an eyebrow but could not stop the flush that came again to my cheeks. I snorted a tiny bit.  

“I’m serious. You have a…knowing grace.” 

My assumptions about his awkward shyness struck down, I now had to determine whether I was tiptoeing through daffodils or bullshit, dancing with a housecat or a lion. I glanced around the gallery, wondering if any of my friends were looking at me, or Elijah. Where was my group? Would they know who this Elijah was? But sightlines were interrupted with partitions, and the only person in view was Lavonna, who was facing the other way, engaged with two people I didn’t know.  

“I’m sorry,” he shook his head. “Sometimes I forget that using words isn’t like using oils or brushes.” 

Again, I thought he was going to say more but he didn’t. About that, anyway. 

He nodded toward the empty plastic cup in my hand. “Would you like another glass of wine?” He said this with a slight flourish of the wrist and an intonation that suggested it was a treat on his behalf, but of course it was just going to be him walking slightly in front of me and relaying what I had just said to him to the bartender. This was slightly annoying, but then again, I appreciated that he had limited options inside the framework of the gallery. 

“Sure,” I replied, looking into my empty cup as though I wasn’t painfully aware that its contents had been drained some time ago.  

It was a small table, probably a card table, covered with linen and attended by some iteration of bartender, homogenized in a black Mao-style smock, with her hair pulled back in a purposefully unremarkable way. On the table stood the choices of red or white and a beer that was known but not good. Choices, but not choices.  

“Mr. Spark.” The bartender smiled with a tiny deferential bow of the head. “What can I get you?” 

Elijah—Mr. Spark, apparently—smiled in response but didn’t seem to register any recognition of the woman. “One white wine…and I’ll have red.” 

Were her eyes lingering on him, or was I imagining it? I tried to look for any residue of connection in the air between them, in his posture, but all he did was take a silver money clip from his pocket and put a five in the tip jar.  

We migrated away from the table, through the light spill of meandering, quirkily frocked art-goers, our dress shoes clomping on the hollow wood floor, and came to a stop in a corner beside a work that suggested both sunrise and sunset. The juxtaposition of the sound of my feet firmly on the floor with the inchoate, wholly cerebral, boundlessly stimulating engagement with art often made me want to cease to exist. I fought off an existential shudder and trained my eyes on him, lightly smiling. 

“Mmmm…” he said, swirling his wine—expertly, I must say, in that tiny cup—raising it to his face, making a show of waving its invisible bouquet toward his nose. “Yes, I thought so…notes of gallery.” He took a sip. “Yes, gallery forward. With…” he smacked his lips delicately, “an aftertaste of poor reviews. Maybe a little apathy.”  

I laughed. “Ooph. I’m glad I got the white.” I took a small sip. “It’s just, you know, a little tart. And who doesn’t like a little tart now and then?”  

He raised his eyebrows and smirked. I fluttered with pleasure at my demonstration that I could reciprocate with humor, not just be the audience. And be a little risqué, to boot. Watch out, Mr. Spark.