“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.
The problem with her, with her friends, was that there was nothing really serious to worry about. No war. No famine. The world might be filled with catastrophes, but none were poised to intrude in their lucky lives. The concerns of her father’s generation were so much more vital. More global. Saina and her friends might travel the world, but no one lived or died on what they did—having an art gallery in Berlin was not the same as fighting an army of Communists.
Worrying, Saina realized, was a luxury in itself. The luxury of purpose.
A life predicated on survival might have been a better life in so many ways. Who cared about artistic fulfillment when your main concern was finding enough food to eat? And, Saina was positive, she would have excelled at finding enough food to eat, no matter what the environment. The hallmarks of twenty-first-century success, at least in her world, were all so abstract. Be a Simpsons character! Give a TED talk! Option your life story!
Each time she thought she’d achieved it, the center slipped away and some other gorgeous abstraction became the only thing to want.
三十六
New Orleans, LA