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With the whiskey in my belly and a solid amount of food after that, I start to feel a lot better. The lights on the dance floor don’t bother me anymore. The third drink begins to look delicious again.
I don’t even mind the story that Ansel is telling right now. It’s something about Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst or somebody. Alyssa Monks. I don’t know. One of those big shots that he knows personally. That he catapulted to stardom. That he has some juicy gossip about. Whatever.
I don’t even mind Seattle’s incessant pictures. If she runs out of memory space on her phone, that’s her problem. I have a dinner plate to demolish.
And suddenly, a fourth drink. Four? Is that really smart?
Well, hey, when will I be able to live it up like this again? The first time that Seattle got me to go out for tapas, I had no idea how quickly those little plates could add up. That plus the sangria, and the final bill came to just over a hundred dollars.
I have a meal plan on my dorm account, so I usually try to eat in the cafeteria. A hundred dollars is literally two months of extra money for me. Stuff that I usually try to spend in two- or three-dollar increments.
But when we went to dinner, I was too embarrassed to confess that I didn’t know what was going to happen. I took a hard swallow and went ahead and spent all the money I had just to save face.
For the next two months, I had to do without any spending money at all. I started pocketing apples and bananas from the cafeteria so I could have the occasional snack. I lost seven pounds, though.
Knowing what I know about her now, I have to wonder if she did that on purpose. It might have been performance art of some kind.
“So tell me, Seattle, what do you have planned for us next? Eh? Some new project?”
Seattle shrugs one shoulder and draws a lazy circle in the air with the tip of her gleaming fork.
“Nothing really new,” she sighs. “Still working on the performance piece, you know. After that, who knows?”
“Ah, yes,” he smiles.
I can see little reflections of the pulsing dance floor lights in the shine of his teeth.
“Performance piece?” I hear myself ask. “I thought you were working on a photography piece? Oh, wait… a mural?”
She sniffs and rolls her eyes. I swear I can see her pulse at the base of her throat.
“The mural was ages ago, Lindy,” she scolds me.
Oh, right. I suddenly remember it. She took a forty-foot wall and nailed a single screw in the middle of it. That was the artistic part: pounding the screw in with a hammer instead of screwing it in with a screwdriver.
“Oh, right, sorry…” I mumble.
“I would love to get a mural like that in my new gallery in Aspen,” Ansel smiles.
Seattle shrugs dismissively. She would probably like to get into his gallery in Aspen too, but she understands that the game is to pretend she doesn’t want to do that at all.
The seat starts to vibrate, thrumming with some bass music. I can’t hear the rest of the music yet, but I can feel the vibration thudding against the back of my thighs. The DJ is doing a sound check, I guess.
“So, no. Still working on the ‘Heuristic Perspectivism and Epistemological Truth Reconstruction’ piece.”
“Ha!” I bark out automatically.
Seattle’s eyebrows go up, and then she lifts her chin and tips her head to one side. This is her critique position. Body language that says “you are not qualified.”
“Sounds intriguing…” Ansel interrupts. “Will you be producing an artifact? Something I can show?”
Seattle sucks her cheeks in, letting her lips form a near-perfect circle of crimson gloss. Those are kissable lips. They really are.
“I swear those are not real words,” I hear myself slur, though I know I shouldn’t.
Words are getting hard. In my experience, that means I’m drunker than I even know yet. I really have to slow down.
“An artifact? Without a doubt,” she murmurs, sending me an icy glance.
