Art Gallery

By Hugh Pedro McGreevey

“Kublai Khan!” I shouted when I saw the canvas. A spread-eagled Amazon, her black muscled legs held aloft and, beyond her muzzled muff, a vista of iridescent cobalt sky above and gray jagged fangs for a mountain range beneath.

The flute in my hand held champagne of the cheap variety, sans the requisite raspberry. My nose was a martini-glowing strawberry. Antics had gotten me excused from the white-collar steak house around the corner. It was something to do with a lobster; it seems that in their insolence they’d cracked the shell for me. The bastards!

Into the night I went. A block from the water-reflected lights of the harbor strip I came on a fancy and forlorn honey blonde. She was smoking a cig. The door behind her was beaten-up wood, opening to an abandoned-looking building. There was a party going on behind the door and I entered.

“Kublai Khan!” A woman stood beside me. She was a forty-year-old with a square jaw and saggy jowls—the veritable clone of a downtown, egg-sandwich-eating insurance agent. Except that her clothes fit the part of a Boho shabby sheik, and the worn leather boots were pure lez. “That’s a poem,” I said. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”

She ignored me. “It’s about hope,” she said. “Cubist in style, but really demonstrating some Egon Schiele vortex eroticism. The physics of dark matter shoot through the figure, or rather,” she continued, “the image of the figure.”

I squinted. There was only one thing to say, but I had said it already. She was selling something, and I was curious what it was.

“Are you family or are you a buyer?” she asked.

“I’m family,” I said.

She squinted at me. Her wrinkled up eyes seemed like flesh made of corrugated cardboard—a pasteboard mask. She had sniffed the air and found me wanting. She walked away.

Swaying and swerving, I accepted another champagne, hold the raspberry. The steak-house martinis from earlier were coming on like a toxin. I was feeling like a poisoned Russian spy: James Bond and Chernobyl vodka and Slavic temptresses, cold-blooded killers, came to mind. I stood my ground.

Then my endurance to poisons paid dividends. (The cold, naked pushups had paid off.) She was the honey blonde—the forlorn smoker from the door. One hundred pounds of whisper: A girl who seemed to land as if alighting from gossamer fairy gliding wings, or some such weak magical realism. She eyeballed the painting.

“In Xanadu,” I said. “The title of this painting.”

“Its called ‘Waiting,’” she said.

“I meant: It should be called.”

She coughed. I sniffed the tobacco on her breath. She held her flute of champagne with both hands, as if she was going to shatter at any moment.

I looked her up and down, relishing Kublai Khan and all the great conquerors. All of them had good lines at moments like these, even though all other forms of recourse were available to them. This is what made them so great: Having good lines even though they didn’t need them.

“The painting is about hope,” I said.

Her eyes brightened. She thought so, too. We spoke about the painting for some time. She was enamored of a man who was enamored.

“Vortex Picasso realism it is not,” I said.

“It is not,” she agreed.

“There’s a purple ray of hope in this painting,” I said. I heard Mongols chanting and war drums beating love songs.

“I’m the artist,” she admitted.

I took a step away and held back tears. She eyed me coolly.

I said hopefully, this time answering: “I’m a buyer.”

We became family.