Page 29 of Dirty Diana
“What are you even talking about?”
A woman in sparkling jewels comes to our table, her beautiful gray hair swept high in a bun. She notices Alicia’s crying and eyes me. “Is she okay?”
“I’m fine.” Alicia sniffs. “Just old.”
I look into the woman’s much older face and smile awkwardly. As she takes her coffee and leaves, I catch Barry making a beeline for us. Alicia pours a coffee for the next guest, her eyes going wide as a cockroach crawls right out of the spigot. In one fluid movement, she chucks the cup in the trash can behind her and pours another—nothing like the way Barry and I panicked and tripped over ourselves in the kitchen.
“Hey, Barry!” He’s materialized at my side. “Everything is going great.” He ignores me, instead studying Alicia’s mascara-streaked face. “Our friend here is working through a teeny existential crisis but in a really fun way. Coffee?”
“Clean her up,” he says.
Alicia sits on the bathroom sink and I close the door behind us. She wets her apron and uses it to wipe her face. “Sorry.”
“You’re fine.”
“Birthdays make me depressed.”
“It’smybirthday. You’re still a twenty-four-year-old spring chicken!”
“Yeah, but you and me are, like, one soul, Diana.” She peers at me through wet lashes. “Twenty-five. We’re not babies anymore.”
I blot her cheeks with a paper towel. “Van Gogh didn’t start art school until he was twenty-seven…”
“Twenty-seven is, like, tomorrow for us. What if I never finish a film?”
“Judy Chicago didn’t show her work until she was thirty-nine.”
Alicia blows her nose and shrugs, takes some solace in this one.
“Grandma Moses waseighty—”
Alicia laughs. “Okay, shut the fuck up, I get it.”
After we exit the bathroom, I’m so preoccupied watching Alicia, to make sure she hustles back to the kitchen, that I almost crash right into Jasper, who is now deep in conversation with a group of men in dark suits. He stops to look me in the eye, as if to say,Everything okay?,and I smile, my heart slamming in my chest.What just happened?I think, walking away. I feel the way I did the night a deer suddenly appeared in my headlights, and I swerved and managed to avoid it just in time.
For the rest of the evening, no matter where I am in the room, I can feel Jasper’s eyes on me. I try not to notice. I have this idea that ifI acknowledge the attention, it will disappear. I’m careful to move in wide circles around him.
I have by now picked a favorite photograph and I linger in front of it. None of Jasper’s images include people, except for this one. A young girl is running along an asphalt road, looking straight past the camera. She is surrounded by the strange desert landscape, almost like an alien planet around her, the road she’s on the only trace of a human-made feature. Her legs are skinny sticks and two knobby knees.
“Do you like it?” Jasper is beside me. Standing so close that our shoulders almost touch. “I think it’s my favorite. Is that okay to say about your own stuff?”
“I love it,” I say.
He stays very close to me, and then moves even closer. I feel the entire left side of his body against mine and realize I’m holding my breath. He’s as terrifyingly beautiful as his photos, and everyone here seems to be a little in love with him.
“It’s so striking that she’s the only person in your show.”
He looks around the room, a slight blush on his cheeks, then waves at a photograph of a cow on the front porch of a house. “I guess we can’t count Junior?”
“Ah, of course,” I say. It occurs to me, a little late, how unnerving it must feel to have all your work on display like this. I regret trying to make any kind of penetrating comment. “We can’t ignore that handsome face.”
Jasper turns his body toward mine. “Want to get some fresh air?”
“Me?”
Jasper finds this funny. He reaches for my hand, resting his fingers softly on the inside of my palm. I open my hand wider and then lace my fingers through his, lightly. The feeling is electric and we hold hands like that, as if in secret, and make our way out of the party. Alicia looks up from the coffee station and her eyes go big. I stare at my checkered Vans and try not to laugh.
We’re two feet from the back door when Sylvia descends on us,the first time I’ve seen her all night without her gallery assistants flanking her. Jasper and I immediately drop hands. She takes him by the arm. “A quick hello to the Wheelers then one more lap. We’re nearly at the finish line.” Her eyes flit across my body. “I’ll take something dry, honey. The driest white you have.”
