He was still for a moment, caught. “‘Made you’ is a little strong, but, yeah, that story helped. You know it did. And I think this one will be good for you, too—don’t you want to speak up for yourself?”
Billy had grown up. Everyone did. He wasn’t the same ambitious innocent who revered the esoteric, who thought that names like Deleuze and Guattari were passwords to a different life, spells that could glamour away a drab past. When she met him, he had read all of Foucault but had never cracked Shakespeare; he knew about Minotaure magazine but couldn’t name the countries involved in World War II. He’d entered her world thinking that it was a magical place, and somewhere along the way he’d become a fixture.
Saina knew exactly the kind of article that he was planning to write. It would contain a shocked series of references to her barely controversial past, an ironic look at her current state of singular domesticity, a supposedly neutral summary of the protests, a sidebar on what Grayson was doing now, with maybe a tiny inset of his chaotic canvas of her in chola mufti, rendered in splashy, ’80s-style primary colors.
But Saina was still too raw to put herself back into the public eye like that, naked, without a new body of work to back her up. The whole time she had been up here, she hadn’t made a thing. Somehow, in all the attendant commotion and loss, the thing itself, the eternal, singular piece of art, had gotten away from her. What she didn’t want to say to herself was this: Saina couldn’t create art without spectacle, and spectacle, by its very nature, had to be witnessed. Not for the first time she wished that she had never sold her Manhattan apartment, never fled to Helios.
“You know, I could always do a write-around.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s when you don’t interview the person. I mean, I could describe this, where you are, what we talked about, even if you don’t participate in the story.”
Was Billy threatening her?
“Speaking of, how did you find out where I was?”
He ignored the question and pressed on. “I could do it, but I don’t want to. I want you to be on board. Saina, this is a cover for New York mag—it’s huge! Look, I could set up a sort of summit, you could meet with some of the protesters, and people are going to look at you differently now, with everything going on with your family and stuff.”
“Billy, you’re freaking me out. How did you know about that?”
“I ran into your ex. He was wasted.”
Saina felt a flash of cold. Even if Grayson didn’t care about her heart, she thought he’d at least want to protect her privacy. Or, failing that, her physical safety.
“And he just told you? What, did he program the directions into your phone and give you a ride to the train station, too?”
“Hey.” Billy sprang up and gripped her arms, a liquid look of concern in his eyes. Fake, Saina reminded herself. It was probably fake. Billy was like those serpent-tongued eunuchs who slunk around royal courts, trading on scraps of gossip. “I just want to help you. I know I’m a reporter, not a critic, but I am really just a fan. I mean it. I think you’re going to be up there with, like, Marina Abramovi? someday. Those protesters are crazy.”
“You’d think I was creating false images of Mohammed and putting him in a flowery headscarf,?” she said, glad even for this scrap of sympathy.
“That’s what America likes to do to its successes, right? Eat them up and spit them out?”
Saina laughed. “Exactly. I’m definitely in the being spit out phase.”
“But it means that you’re someone to be taken seriously. Why else would they want to give you a cover?”
“Because my life is an art world soap opera.” They stared at each other for a moment. “Did you . . . did you pay him or something?”
“Would that have worked?”
“Well, apparently he was willing to sell me out for nothing, so cash could only have sped up the process.”
“Does he need it?”
Saina stopped herself. Of course. Billy was just trying to get his story. In a way, she didn’t even fault him—she was a commodity in his eyes, their connection a stock that had yielded excellent dividends in the past and now promised to pay off even more if he could persuade it to split.
“Billy, I’m tired. And you have to catch the seven-thirty train. I’ll call a cab. There are only two in town, so it’ll probably take a while for one of them to get here.”
“Hey, no, no, no. I thought we were having a good talk, right?”
She wanted to wound him. Who was he to insinuate himself into her life, to ambush her here where she should be safe, to suggest that he’d had anything to do with the life that she’d made?
“I never thought you’d end up just being a paparazzo, Billy.”