The Wangs vs. the World (33 page)

She tried to pull him down onto the seat, but he shook his head. “Stay like this,” he said, out of breath. “Just in case.”

“Cops?”

“Five-o.”

“Oh, you’re tough now?” she teased.

He nodded and bounced her in his lap. “Do you think it’ll always be like this?”

“In the backseat of a car? Probably.”

“Illicit and open to misinterpretations.”

“Exactly.” They kissed, lips parted a little too wide in their haste to finish the deed, to cap the moment.

She could always tell when Leo was close. He made his surprised face and nudged at her so that she knew to slide up and snatch a crumpled T-shirt from the floor of the cab, positioning it under him just in time.

They rested against each other for a minute, and then she said, “What if you didn’t have to pull out?”

“You want to go on the Pill?”

“No, no—I mean, you know, what if we gave one of these little guys a chance?”

“Are you . . . do you mean that? Are you serious?”

Saina thought for a minute. “We’d make some cute babies.”

He nodded, wary. Lifted her over his lap and sat her down next to him. Patted down the skirt of her dress so that it fell correctly. Zipped up his jeans. Buckled himself into them. Draped a heavy arm around her, and said, “We’d better go—you’re going to be late.”

Leo was right, but that didn’t make it any better. By the time they’d parked closer to the red warehouse and made their way towards the crowd, the ceremony had already begun. As they got closer, the weight of Leo’s nonresponse started to grow, pulling her off-kilter, sinking the buzz she might have drawn from the waiting crowd, but also dulling her fear.

Someone Saina vaguely recognized was talking now, a woman in black-framed glasses, a fake mustache, and an asymmetrical haircut—a decade of Williamsburg trends distilled. The speaker tugged at the mustache and talked in metered verse about it being some sort of symbol of fidelity to the self, to the artist within. As she ended her allotted minute-long speech, she ripped it off and screamed, and the students all screamed with her. Internally, Saina rolled her eyes.

This wasn’t like going back to her world, exactly. It was more of a purgatory. A series of simulacrums, promises being held out to these students of the lives that could be theirs. She saw now that she was here as an emissary from one of those lives, though not quite the same one as the woman with the fake ’stache, thank god. Her name was next on the program, so Saina stepped into place in front of the mic. Saina looked out at the audience. They were backlit, too. The warehouse had been transformed into a gallery for the end of the year show and light spilled out the open doors, casting all of their faces in shadow. It was still easy to pick out the parents. Even in repose, they hovered, nervous. The students were also nervous, but in a different sort of way. They tried harder to hide it, behind giant scarves and aggressively mismatched articles of clothing. They downed their wine steadily and draped themselves over one another, facing forward and paying attention to the speakers even as they stroked and scratched and pawed one another like genderless clumps of grown-up kittens, emanating an unfocused heat.

All these graduates had somehow paid around $100,000 to Become Artists. An extravagant ticket price that some people were brave enough or stupid enough to avoid. Would it work out for any of them? Would they get to be the people that they wanted to be? Out of Saina’s class of twenty-six at Columbia, only a few were still making art in any serious way. It had only been seven years since graduation, but most of them were working as graphic designers or teachers. But maybe, for some of them, that was alright. Not everybody wanted a big life.

Behind her, someone coughed conspicuously.

Saina looked down at her cards, but everything written on them seemed blurry and useless.

Everyone in the audience looked up at her.

She looked out at them.

They kept on staring.

The depilated speaker stared, too, sympathetically.

The professors flanking the cheese table stared, less sympathetically.

Was the clock already ticking?

These poor kids who were, some of them, older than she was, but probably on the whole quite a bit poorer. Their parents were starting to look uncomfortable. This wasn’t what they had paid for. Saina wondered how many of the students recognized her. If she didn’t say a word, if she just stood up there for sixty full seconds without making a single sound, would there be reports of it on the Internet the next morning?

She remembered lifting a slat of the blind in her gallerist’s second-floor office as angry women on Twenty-sixth Street picketed her
Look/Look
show. That moment had felt like this.

Grayson leaving her the first time, but not the second.

Her father’s everything-is-gone phone call.

That bleak blank minute after she first entered her house in Helios.

All those moments where the bottom of the world drops away and we’re left untethered, a cosmonaut lost in oxygenless space.

Behind her, the emcee didn’t try to hide his panic. “Fifteen seconds, Saina,
fifteen seconds!
” he hissed.

Well. She might as well say something. “You don’t need a whole speech or a performance from me. All I’m going to tell you is that if you’re going to be artists, then you have to ask yourselves, do you rebuild the world or do you destroy it? That is the question.”

She paused until she realized that she had more to say. “It’s okay. There is no right answer. The world’s agnostic. It’s happy either way. What matters is that you ask yourself the question. That’s it. Ask the question. Actually, no. That’s not it. Figure out your own question. Figure out your own question and ask it.”

She stopped, a little out of breath. Was Leo just scared of babies? Maybe thinking about having children was different if you were an orphan. What had she even said just now? Or maybe it was because they’d really only been together for a few months, and she’d already abandoned him once for Grayson, and, really, who knew what was going to happen? Oh yeah. Rebuild the world, destroy it.

“Okay,” she said to the uncertain crowd. “Yep, that’s it.”

Inside the gallery, no one was talking to her. Even Leo was deep in conversation with someone else, a parent, judging by the polo shirt and pleated khakis. Someone was now serving pie to everyone on cracked china saucers. Somehow, this was their thesis project. Saina hated pie.

Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her jacket. It was Grace again. She had already called five times tonight, no doubt with some complaint about how weird Barbra was or how their dad kept trying to buy her ice cream sundaes like she was a little girl. Saina sent the call to voicemail again. Why couldn’t Gracie just text like a normal teenager?

At the far end of the gallery, a woman in her thirties with a pink bob stood behind a life-size papier-mâché version of Lucy’s advice stand from the
Peanuts
comic strip, busily slicing oranges and limes under a sign that read
PROUST AND PIMM’S 5 CENTS
. Saina watched as she dumped the pile of citrus into a giant pitcher, poured in a few liters of soda water, and unscrewed a bottle of Pimm’s. Proust was, of course, represented by the pile of buttery madeleines her classmates were snatching off a platter as she shouted, “Five cents, guys, it’s a practical exchange!”

Saina had seen projects like this in New York—hospitality art, she and her friends called it. The ButterBeen Collective, who talked their way into a pop-up sit-in at the New Museum, which just involved teaching knitting and serving cookies, or the Shum twins, who offered “residencies” to donut shops at their gallery in Chelsea. How many times did people have to prove that anything could be art before we could finally admit that very little was actually art?

Theoretically, Saina understood it. Art was engagement, art was simplicity, art was an outgrowth of its time, and they were living in a moment in which service jobs were the fastest growing sector of the economy, so it made sense that artists would want to examine the actions that made up those jobs. They were in a period of new domesticity, where women had begun caring about making their homes perfect again—as far as she was from being a suburban housewife, Saina knew that she couldn’t deny her similarity to these women—and this was a valid way to critique the shift.

But, really, she couldn’t get over the fact that this was as far as their ambitions reached. It all seemed so needlessly ladylike. “‘I’ve made a very, very large meal, enough for multitudes, and I’d like you all to eat it with me! My creation satisfies your hunger.’ ”

“Do you want a bite?” Leo held out a fallen slice, a hunk of crust soaking in a puddle of blueberry ooze, topped with a miniature plastic fork.
Plastic
. This room had none of what she missed about her former existence. The openings full of wild things corralled into white-walled bunkers and set loose amid armies of perfectly polished stemware, row after row of wineglasses and champagne flutes that chimed against each other delicately, a rarefied twinkle that underscored every conversation. She missed the way the women dressed themselves like pieces of art—their clothes complex and not sexually attractive in an expected way, yet in the rewritten visual code of that world, all of those bubble dresses and harem pants and complicated muumuus became more desirable than some cinched-waist-boobs-out look.

In this blazing bright room full of hopeful graduates, she felt deflated. Saina shook her head at the pie. Leo shrugged and forked it up himself.

“Why are you even eating that? It’s gross.”

“I’m hungry. We got here too late for the cheese and stuff.”

They’d never had a fight before. Leo had never been
annoying
before. She watched as his lips, glistening with a sheen of sugary blue syrup, mashed against themselves, chewing up the art pie. An hour and a half ago, those lips had been on her nipple.

“Why’d you get so weird?”

He stopped chewing and looked at her. “When?”

“You know, in the car.”

“Let’s not talk about that now.”

“Why not? Who cares about these people?”

“I thought you did.”

“Well, I don’t.”

They looked at each other, not speaking.

“Look,” said Saina, “I know we just got back together. It’s not that I’m dying to have a baby right now, okay? Don’t worry.”

“That’s not it. I—”

“Are you worried about Grayson? Because that’s over, you know. I’m here with
you,
not him.”

“No, Saina, listen—”

“Hi, Saina Wang?” Winged eyeliner, tangled black hair, flowered babydoll dress, and Doc Martens. Despite herself, Saina liked her.

“Hi.” Saina offered a hand. The girl took it and squeezed it.

“Thanks, but I actually want to see your other hand.”

She felt Leo suppress a laugh next to her. “What do you mean?”

“The ring! Sorry, I’m such a dork.
Vogue
’s like my bible. I read that story? The one about your engagement ring? I’m obsessed. Can I see it?”

Saina fluttered her empty left hand. “Sorry. It’s kind of like the way you’re never supposed to knit a guy a sweater or get your girlfriend’s name tattooed on your arm. Never let
Vogue
do a story on your ring. We’re not engaged anymore.”

“No! Are you serious? No! But you guys were, like, royalty. Was he a dick? Do we hate him?”

“It’s fine. Really.”

It was strange to think of herself as someone who might be speculated about, but back in college she had been just as breathless over the details of her professors’ lives, of the lives of the already successful artists who had graduated just a few years before, thinking mistakenly that knowing was the same as belonging.

They turned away from the girl’s disappointed face and ran straight into Saina’s friend Gharev, the program head who had invited her to speak. He wedged himself between the two of them and clasped Saina in a hug. He pulled back, hands gripping her shoulders, and shook her enthusiastically. “Brilliant! You were brilliant! Amazing time play. Empathetic anxiety! The anxiety of influence! Oh, you had me sweating bullets!” He paused to pluck a plastic glass of half-drunk wine from a table nearby. Saina was pretty sure it wasn’t his. Swirling it, he sipped. “This wine is shit! Next time I see you, you’ll come to my place in Red Hook, I’ll pour you something good. I just got a case of Zin from one of those bonkers new biodynamic vineyards where they have to bury a ram’s horn at midnight—you know Zin’s back, right? It’s amazing. Smooth. Like velvet! Like tits! Velvet tits!”

“Who is this guy? I love this guy!” Leo clapped Gharev on the shoulder of his sleek black jacket, laughing. “Look at him. He’s like a CIA operative.”

“Oh my god.” Saina dropped her voice. “Gharev. Are you rolling?” His pupils were huge and he still hadn’t let go of her arm.

Gharev grinned. “Just high on life, baby, high on life.” Across the room, a student beckoned him. As he started moving, he shouted back at them. “We did get some real coffee, though.” He waved vaguely towards a side room, where two bearded men in bow ties and heavy canvas aprons were pouring slow streams of steaming water through glass funnels balanced on a wooden board. “It’s amazing! It has a nose!”

Saina and Leo looked at each other, laughing.

“It has a nose!” she said, tweaking his.

Leo swirled an imaginary glass of wine, lifting it up and sucking air through his teeth. “Ah, complex. There’s a brashness, but under that do I detect a hint of . . . wistfulness? Yes, a supple wistfulness with notes of cayenne and joy. And Band-Aids.”

“Oh, I love it when they say that things taste like Band-Aids.”

“And dirt. Though, to be fair, a lot of things do taste like dirt, in a pretty good way.”

“You’re such a farmer,” she said, smiling at him. “I’m still mad at you, though. But we can talk about it later.”

He brought her hand up to his lips and kissed it once, twice, three times.

She downed the last inch of her mediocre wine.
Whee!
She was a little bit drunk.