“The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. ‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
―Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Dare
“If I live through this, remind me to never, under any circumstances, do
this again. Got it?”
Ingrid’s head jerked. “Are you sniffing glue? You’re going to be
hanging in the Guggenheim, while you’re still alive. And it’s a solo show. Artists are lotto-lucky if they score even one of these and you’re already bitching about not doing another one?”
Leave it to Ingrid to always give me perspective.
“Where’s Alice?” she asked.
“She’s at school for the day,” I told her, thumbing through some of my old photographs. “But she’ll be back tonight and will stay through the weekend.”
“Good. I like her,” she said. “Don’t fuck it up.”
“Nice,” I said, listening but not listening. Something was gnawing at me.
“What?” she asked, arms crossed.
I eyed her before looking back at the work I had already done.
No way was this good enough.
“You and I know the only reason why I got the Guggenheim show . . .” I trailed off. I couldn’t even say it out loud.
“Finish what you were going to say,” she said, searching my face.
“It’s certainly not because I’m at that level of talent,” I said.
She frowned. “That’s bullshit,” she said, then something behind her eyes shifted. “You think the only reason you got the show is because of Chloe’s death.”
“Well, of course I think that. Because it’s true.”
“It’s not true,” she insisted. “You’ve sold out every show you’ve had since coming back to New York. Your mixed-medium work has been heralded as the bridge between photorealism and postmodern art. No one does what you do.”
I gave a quick nod. She came over to where I was standing, feet wide and arms crossed in front of me. Her small hand rested on my forearm.
“What happened with Chloe does not define you as an artist,” she said.
“I know that.”
Ingrid peered at me. “Do you?”
Just then, someone hit the front door buzzer.
“I’ll get it,” Ingrid said, taking the stairs because it was faster.
It wasn’t too long before I heard her voice over the studio intercom.
“Um, Dare? You need to come down. Right away.”
She sounded worried. And now I was worried because nothing rattled Ingrid.
I slid down the stair rails and barreled through the double doors, leading to the main studio floor. She was at her desk, with a newspaper opened on top.
“What is it?” I asked, coming up next to her.
“A friend of mine saw this and dropped it off just now,” she said, turning the pages to the front.
It was this morning’s edition of the New York Daily Post.
And there was a picture of my bare ass, dick deep in Alice, in the
elevator last night. The headline read “Art World’s Bad Boy on a Wild Ride with Mystery Woman.”
“Shit,” I said, pulling at the end of my beard. “When I find those two dipshits, I’m going to shove their camera phones so far up their asses . . .”
“At least you have a nice ass,” she said, chuckling to herself.
I gave her a look.
“What? Hey, just because I’m not looking to tap that, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate its aesthetic value.”
I grimaced, scanning the article.
“I’ll save you the trouble,” she said. “The article mentions Chloe, saying how ‘the people of New York’ wondered if you were going to ever move on.”
“Thank Christ Alice was still dressed,” I said.
“Speak for yourself, I was hoping for a peek at those luscious breasts of hers.”
I blew out a frustrated breath while folding the newspaper and tucking it under my arm. “My girl is not into attention, especially this kind.”
She shrugged. “Text her. Better coming from you first, right?”
I looked at the time. She would be in class until late afternoon.
“I have so much to do for the show,” I said more to myself than to Ingrid.
“Listen, you go and I’ll sort through all your work. You have a lot here, Dare, more than you realize. The show’s supposed to be a mid-career retrospective, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay then,” she said as she started to move pieces to different areas of the room. “By the time you get back, you can decide what goes in the show.”
“That’ll work . . . I owe you, Ingrid,” I said.
Something passed over her. “Dare, you found me ankle deep in a dumpster, weighing eighty-five pounds, looking for any scraps of food and art supplies I could find. It took three treatments to get all the lice out of my hair and too many doctor visits to count, to heal the rest of my body. You never once made a pass at me or made me feel I owed you for anything you gave.
“But more than that, in a world that was more than willing to throw me out, like I was garbage, you loved me unconditionally, giving me living proof there is a God, that He loves me and is looking out for me. If I lived a thousand lifetimes, you wouldn’t owe me a damn thing, Dare DeMarco Grangeworth.
“Now, get out of here so I can work-and find your woman and make everything okay for her like you did with me.”