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Ansel stands back, massaging his jowls with his fingertips on both sides. He is wearing sunglasses made of tiny, cobalt-blue circles that are perched way down on his nose. Practically at the tip. They make him look decidedly bug-like as he squints at the piece.
Muttering to himself, he takes two steps back and begins pacing out the floor, as though measuring it. He glances over his right shoulder at the painting again, then flinches back as though completely caught by surprise.
Executing a practically perfect military about-face, Ansel marches six paces in the opposite direction, and then looks suddenly at the painting again from that angle, with his hands flung out to both sides, fingers splayed, in a gesture commonly known as “jazz hands.”
“Honestly, he does this with everything,” Seattle mutters under her breath. “He never gets tired of it. You would think he would find some new choreography or something.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I shrug. “I’m kind of enjoying it. I have a little soundtrack going in my head.”
She raises one eyebrow at me and pivots slightly. “Really? What is the soundtrack?”
“‘Hey, Big Spender,’” I laugh.
Seattle—who is now called Sandra—claps both hands over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. Still, Ansel gets suspicious and places his fists on his hips.
“Okay, stand right there,” she insists, running over to him in her lilac platform heels with butterfly embellishments that seem to crawl up her calves.
Ansel obediently strikes the pose, and Sandra positions herself underneath him so she can angle her phone toward them with a bit of the painting in the background.
Click.
“I’m going to post this one right away,” she smiles as she stares at it. “My tits look amazing.”
“I’m sure they do, darling,” he drawls as he walks back toward me.
Cringing only slightly, I allow him to hold me by the shoulders and mock kiss each of my cheeks.
He pivots and waves his arm through the air in a flourish, taking in the entire painting. It is one of my bigger works, almost twenty-five feet wide. A seething mass of blue-green figures seem to pulse just below the surface of a sheet of semitransparent ice. Like all my work, it has a distinctly figural quality, but never really lets the viewer pick out a single figure. Instead, indefinable fleshy shapes twist and tumble over each other, like some kind of orgiastic display. It is definitely one of my best.
“It’s brilliant,” he sighs as though transported. “It’s… oh, I don’t know. Sandra! What’s the word?”
“Inseminal!!” she yells out from across the gallery.
“Sounds naughty,” I remark.
Ansel takes my hand and tucks it under his arm so we can walk arm in arm back to his office.
“Well, you would know,” he quips cattily. “How are the boy-boy-boy-boys, anyway?”
“You’re just jealous,” I sigh, and he doesn’t even answer me because he knows it is true. “Actually, Diego should be picking me up in just a couple of minutes. Would you like to say hello?”
“No, that would just make me nauseous,” Ansel pouts. “Let’s just get you a check and send you on your way!”
My heels ring out across the gallery floor as we move to the back office. This is one of his most beautiful spaces, right in the heart of the Miami tourist district. Seattle—I mean, Sandra—has found a real audience here for her gigantic metalwork sculptures.
As it turns out, she has a real talent for welding. She did have to give up the flowy, gossamer outfits. But she has been incredibly successful the last couple of years.
Ansel stretches ahead and plucks a check off the corner of his granite slab desk. He waves it in the air before presenting it to me. I can only glance at it. That many zeros makes me woozy.
“Thank you, Ansel,” I smile.
“No, thank you!” he insists. “You are definitely worth fighting for, Lindy. You did make me struggle, though. You vixen!”
“Everybody has to struggle, Ansel. Now I have to get going. Will you kiss Sandra for me?”
“Of course, of course,” he fusses, shooing me out of his office and back to the front door.
With the check tucked in my bag, I hold my breath and walk out into the blazing furnace that is summer in Miami. Luckily, Diego is already at the curb and waiting for me. He rolls down the window as I approach.
