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-maché 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—”