Ryan still looks sorry. He asked me because he didn’t know what else to say. Now he’s trying to think of the next thing. And because I was thinking so hard about kissing him, now all I’m feeling is the act of not kissing him, of having him here, but not really.
All of a sudden it’s like the whole room is pressing on me. Lehna is angry and Ryan is blank and the constellations in Katie’s paintings are spelling out a warning. I feel the two men behind me, kissing over all those years, and I see Audra cross like a hurricane over to my mother, and see Brad blow away from her, chastised. People are looking at me, but nobody’s seeing me, and the pink walls are starting to waver in the corners of my vision, as if we’re trapped in some crowded ventricle, some noisy heart.
I need a new life, and I need it right away.
I don’t say goodbye to any of them. I push toward the valve, swim toward the door. I ignore every voice, every look, everything but my own thought to get out of here. I hit the sidewalk and turn left, go to the side of the gallery, the back of it. I sit down on the curb. I put my head down. I hold my head together.
There’s a burst of incandescence, a rainless bolt of lightning. I look up into it, and when the blindness shifts back to seeing, I find Garrison, the photographer from that night, smiling down at me.
“Sorry about that,” he says, lowering his camera. “But I couldn’t resist. Such beautiful desolation.”
“It’s not beautiful,” I tell him. “Desolation is not beautiful.”
“It is from the outside.”
“Well, I’m not on the outside.”
He sits down next to me on the curb. “You will be one day. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but someday you will be.”
I’m not even sure he recognizes me—I can’t see why he’d recognize me—until he asks, “So, did everyone like the other photograph? Did it have the desired effect?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say. “I mean, everyone was talking about it. Everyone but the guy I wanted the most to like it.”
He pats me on the knee, in a way that Katie would, not in a way that someone at Happy Happy would.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, because I’m really not that much older than you. And I know that when I was your age, this kind of advice would have gone in one ear and out the other. But I’m gonna say it anyway. Most lives are long, and most pain is short. Hearts don’t actually break; they always keep beating. This is not to diminish what you’re going through, but I’ve been there, and I’ve been through it. As that famous homosexual Winston Churchill once said, if you find yourself heartbroken, keep walking.”
“Winston Churchill was gay?”
“Well, no—I was just trying to add some levity there.”
I can’t say I feel much better. But I do feel a little calmer. So there’s that.
The photographer stands. Raises his camera back to his eye.
“One more, for posterity.”
I don’t pose. I let him see me as I am.
“Imperfect,” he says. “Which is perfect.”
And then, like everyone else, he asks the question of the hour: “Where’s your friend?”
14
Kate
I find him on the sidewalk, exactly where his text said he would be.
“I can’t believe you came,” I say.
“I can’t believe you didn’t.”
Even though we’re behind the gallery, the lights and voices from within it tell me that the party is still going strong almost four hours after it began. I saw Ms. Rivera and Ms. Gao getting back into a car when I got here, but I can hear Lehna’s voice and Brad’s and a laugh so shrill and joyless it must be Audra’s. I don’t even listen for Violet’s voice because I know Violet isn’t here. She’s somewhere else, waiting for me to make it up to her.
Brad’s voice booms from inside, announcing one hour left to bid on the auction.
“Can we go somewhere else?” I ask. “We can come back here later, but I can’t go in now.”
Mark stands up.
I look at him; he looks at me.
We are not the same as we were on Sunday.
He runs a hand through his hair and even the way it falls has changed. He isn’t a golden boy, charming a bar with his winsome looks and wholesome sex appeal. He’s wounded and damaged, tired and lost. If he were dancing atop a bar now, just as many people would watch him, but not a single one would smile.
I can feel the change in me, too, but I don’t want to think about it. It’s one thing to be wrecked by another person, entirely something else to be wrecked by yourself.
“Garrison showed up here looking for you.”
“Are you serious?”
“He took my picture and gave me advice. He may think he’s my fairy godfather.”
I smile in spite of myself, and then I think of Saturday night, of that mansion and all those people and the feeling that anything was possible.
“They aren’t ever going to ask us what happened,” I say. “If they haven’t done it by now, they never will.”
“I know.”
The car parked in front of us rumbles to life, shines its headlights into my eyes.
“What advice did he give you?”
“Some stuff about hearts. And that Churchill quote about walking through hell, only he made it about heartbreak.”