The Medium of Desire Read online

  Olivia leaned in and wrapped her arms around her father. “Thanks Dad, you’re the best,” she said.

  “So are you,” he said, leaning in and kissing her on the forehead.

  The front door rattled and Kelly walked in with a smile sagging across her face like wet laundry hung on the line.

  Lines formed across her forehead, the gaps between eyelids narrowed.

  “What are you guys doing?”

  “Just talking,” Dad said.

  Kelly didn’t seem satisfied with that answer. She opened her mouth a couple of times, like she was about to say something, but stopped herself. Finally she asked: “Are we ready to go to dinner?”

  Olivia started to tell her to take a hike, but staring at her, she looked so defeated, contrite, and to have laid into her in that moment would have been like kicking a dying dog. Dad gazed at Olivia, waiting on her to say something. Instead, she stood and readjusted her shirt.

  “Let’s go,” Dad said.

  Olivia mulled her father’s advice over dinner. Her parents were being respectful, which was a welcome development. As painful as it was, she replayed that afternoon with Brett at the Secco wine bar, trying to remember the exact words she had used to bust them apart, trying to think of some pretext to reach out to him. She had to compete, not only with her own senselessness, but Carol. Could Brett really be into Carol? Carol might be free spirited, but she was so rotten. Maybe rotten was too strong. Unseemly was more like it. How could he want to spend his time with someone so unseemly?

  Olivia woke the next morning to the same thoughts. She went for a jog. She cooked herself a big breakfast. She settled into her parents’ screen porch with a paperback copy of Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money. While reading the history of the development of the international monetary system, her thoughts coalesced around Brett’s painting of her. She wanted that painting for every reason, and she saw in asking for it a bridge to reopen their lines of communication. She could contact him about the purely business proposal, a safe enough topic to initiate a conversation. If he ignored her, well, she could chalk it up to an unwillingness to sell a painting and not his refusal to talk to her.

  She picked up her phone and typed a text message: “I’d like to buy a painting.” She took a big gulp of wine and pressed send.

  Chapter 37

  Brett had had his big critical validation and big payoff, but he didn’t have the high and feeling of wholeness he’d anticipated. It was Paco’s opening day and they hadn’t spoken in weeks. Carol was around, sure, but she’d been steadily increasing her demands. After some conversations with a couple of her Weatherman Underground cohorts, he suspected she had loftier designs than playing muse. She wanted to brainwash him, and his conversion was the cost of her services. This was a bargain he could not strike, so he stretched negotiations, navigating the stream of counteroffers communicated through an evolved code of subtext, body language, and passive aggression.

  He didn’t know if Olivia was still in town or whether he’d ever see her again. She was irreplaceable and when she’d been in his life she’d altered the way he lived it, and there was no artificial contrivance he could manifest to replace the energy she’d injected into their time together. Like her algorithms, her company was proprietary and brilliant. She was a social genius, perfect parts intellect, comedian and rebel. In argument, she was formidable. When he instructed her, her ears became vacuums for knowledge, filtering the informational debris on a molecular scale. He had no idea where she was, perhaps already shelved away in a skyscraper in San Francisco. Paco, however, should be setting up in the park. He had told Paco he would help with opening day; maybe keeping that promise wasn’t such a bad idea.

  Paco was peeling plastic from the food cart’s aluminum panels when Brett peddled into the park. The grass was speckled with white clover, layers of evergreen and deciduous foliage canopying the sky, a brick alley bisecting the space. A house-shaped box on a pole dealt in free books, a complex statue the size of a man was inexplicably situated in a dark corner. It sat as if to confirm, if you did not already know, that the park was decorated and enhanced with various implements from benefactors who wanted to give a second life to a former prize. Eclectic and organic as the community garden it fronted, it was a case study of place designed for artistic citizenry. A sign at the exit simply read: “Magic.” Whether or not Scuffletown Park was designed or just happened was open to conjecture.

  “What’s up bro?” Brett asked.

  Glancing around, Paco acted as if the salutation had not been intended for him.

  “You going to be like that?” Brett asked.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Paco wouldn’t make eye contact with Brett, in the manner of a child who’d had his feelings hurt.

  “I’m sorry I ditched on you. I didn’t mean to cause a riff.”

  “How do you mean you didn’t mean to when you walked out the door when I asked you to stay?”

  “I knew what I was doing. I was going to see my sister, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “I’m not just one of your projects, you know. I’m not some painting you can leave half finished. This is my fucking future. This is my fucking life.”

  “I’m sorry. Look, I should have been more sensitive.”

  “I’m not sensitive, but yea, you get the idea.” Paco brandished his knife-tipped tongs like a ninja demonstrating his katana.

  “So can I help?” Brett asked.

  “I don’t know what use you’ll be, but. . .”

  Brett yanked a dish towel from the prep table and snapped it at Paco’s mid-section.

  “Okay! Okay! Lay off!”

  The grill was lit and the first kebabs thrown on. Drinks were iced, aluminum foil squares torn, napkins on display for easy take, clear and conspicuous folding sign placed in the alley.

  Sales did not roll in. There were only two others in the park, and apparently neither were in the market for lunch. Foot traffic was nonexistent. Save for the cicadas and stray songbirds practicing scales, it seemed to be the quietest place in the city. The stacks at VCU’s Cabell Library were louder than this. Hollywood Cemetery was louder than this, and probably got more foot traffic, too. Had his friend made a tactical error by choosing Scuffletown Park? The cart could be moved anywhere, but what toll would aborting the original venue take on an entrepreneur’s strained nerves? How many moves did Paco have before he’d throw in the dish rag?

  A young man turned into the park. Their first customer. The guy rummaged through his pockets as he approached the cart, and Brett tensed, waiting to assist with the first order. Instead of a wallet, however, the guy pulled out his earphones, plugged his ears, and walked past the food cart.

  He didn’t even acknowledge the cart existed.

  It was one of those moments that was supposed to be a moment of silent repose, a moment when the silence is so tangible you can lean against it like a crutch, an emotional prosthetic, but a wailing siren cut the air, possibly a fire truck racing to put out a conflagration. Despite how badly Brett wanted to say something, he hesitated to say anything he might have said, anticipating Paco either taking offense or finding justification to scald him.

  Okay, so he felt an obligation to his friend to be there, but he was hating most of it, and worse he was dreading to finish because then he was supposed to go hang out with Carol. If he was explaining the situation to a headshrinker, he needed time with Carol, as time with a female satisfied a critical spiritual need. But he also dreaded spending time with Carol because he couldn’t predict how she might next try to mind fuck him. The following, for instance, was a conversation they’d actually had:

  “Would you rather die by fire or die by freezing?” Carol had asked.

  “I’d rather not die at all.”

  “You have to answer. It’s for a thought study I’m doing,” she said. If he didn’t answer she would hold out, he was never quite sure what, they’d even had sex once or twice during these lulls,
but she withheld some necessary feminine approval or gift of attention, all very abstract stuff, yet his craving for what she doled out was concrete and undeniable. Of course, he didn’t have to answer these sadistic inquiries. Trouble was he did answer them, and answering them made him feel lousy. She was conditioning him, and he was frightened by her progress.

  He had turned his phone off earlier to decompress, but in this lull, he turned it on.

  One new message.

  He couldn’t deal with Carol now. He didn’t even want to imagine what she might want. Maybe texting to ask him to bring a knife to the Weatherman Underground meeting tonight so they could cut their hands and sign their names in blood on a Declaration of Domestic Disapproval.

  Business was at a complete standstill, exacerbated by the fact business had never begun. Paco was quiet and Brett was quiet and the silence was gradually evolving into the sound of defeat. He felt abandoned, like he reckoned a kid must feel when watching his father leave for work on a Saturday. That sense of loss an alpine skier feels when the snows evaporate on the first warm days of spring.

  He looked at his phone. It was a message from Olivia: “I’d like to buy a painting.”

  Olivia.

  Why was she patronizing him? She was probably probing to see how quickly he responded. Using him for validation while she felt alone in a strange city. He shoved his phone into his pocket.

  The phone vibrated again, another message from Olivia:

  “Can we meet up today? I’d really like to buy that painting you did of me. I’d like to get it squared away before I leave.”

  Squared away. Like buying one of his paintings was tantamount to completing some yard work, or picking up dry cleaning. But being honest with himself, and in spite of his best interests, he wanted to see her. Thinking about her, he realized he’d been trying his best not to think about her, and thinking about her made him feel good, helped him recall a time when everything he wanted had seemed within reach. Olivia had been emotionally unreliable and now that commercial interest in his art was taking off, how could he risk she’d abuse his feelings and leave him worse off than last time, this time without a Carol to fall back on, alone and unable to work and utterly destitute. He couldn’t risk the stability he needed to push forward on the chance they might rekindle their relationship.

  “I’m working with Paco, can’t talk now,” he texted. He turned his phone off again and put it away inside the food cart, out of sight, resolved to not look at it again for the rest of the afternoon.

  While lost in his own inarticulate thoughts, two girls approached the cart and started firing off orders as if they were old customers, long-ago accustomed to Paco’s menu.

  Paco threw two shrimp kebabs on the grill. Brett fished two cans of lemonade out of the cooler, and tallied up the bill.

  “That’s five a piece or ten altogether.”

  One of the girls handed Brett a twenty.

  A couple had been lying together in the grass, nuzzling but not quite openly kissing, their curiosity piqued by the girls, dusted themselves off and ordered two chicken kebabs a piece. Paco chatted up his guests, not shy about introducing himself, asking them to come back and tell their friends, tell everyone. Brett impulsively started to check his phone again, to see what Olivia had texted back, but while he waited for it to fire up a deluge of customers descended on them, some corporate lunch retreat had broken in Paco’s favor, the queue stretched in singles and twos into the depths of the park.

  “Two shrimp kebabs, that’ll be eight dollars,” Paco said, sizzling the order on the grill. “How’d you hear about us?”

  “Someone saw something on Instagram.”

  Paco’s guerilla social-media campaign was showing early signs of success. They got so busy Brett had to help with the food, too, tearing sheets of aluminum foil and wrapping it around the kebabs as they came off the grill, counting money, dipping drinks out of the cooler. In the cash box, the small bills were really starting to swell. The little garden park had rapidly filled with customers lounging around enjoying kebabs, while passersby were caught in the web of enthusiasm, perhaps lured in by social media and word of mouth, as well as the chatter of the crowd and the wafting smells of the grill. Over the past week, Paco had relentlessly called friends, handed out menus, and given out little gift cards for a free meal. His efforts had tilled a rich soil.

  The rush finally quelled, giving the guys a moment to slow down. Paco peeked in the moneybox, slamming the lid. Then he looked again.

  “What?”

  “There’s money in there,” Paco whispered.

  Jolted, Brett remembered their first conversation, from dreaming up the business, to securing the start-up loan, food cart shopping, dealing with the lawyer. It had really happened. He was riding high, when Olivia walked into the park.

  Couldn’t the painting wait? What did she really want? Couldn’t she just give him peace? They locked eyes. There was no escaping. Whatever she wanted to say, she was going to have her opportunity.

  Chapter 38

  Olivia’s ribcage took shots from her battering heart. He was busy, and he wouldn’t want to talk to her anyway. Could she blame him? After she’d declined to move in? Declined to work with him? Walked away and held her silence? Wasn’t he dating Carol, and hadn’t she been at least partially responsible for that? She wished she could move backwards in time, if not to make things right then at least to do them differently. She had no place in his life. She shouldn’t have come here, but he’d already seen her, here she was, and she’d resolved to do this so she could at least try to salvage something. That painting was a vivid memory of happiness, a vision of whom she hoped to become. Wouldn’t he think it was flattering she wanted to buy a painting? Maybe it would be the spark they needed to rekindle their friendship. Maybe she was delusional. There was only one way to find out.

  The guests in front of her paid, placing her at the front of the line.

  “Olivia,” Paco yelled out. He jerked a sizzling beef kebab off the grill, dangling it in front of her. “Free of charge,” Paco said, his eyes gleefully shut.

  “Thanks, Paco. Brett, could I talk to you for a moment?”

  “I’m really busy,” Brett said, fiddling with a carton of aluminum foil, before organizing his napkins.

  “Go on, Brett. I can handle it,” Paco said.

  “I don’t want to abandon you,” Brett said.

  “Nah, go on man. I got this. Go talk. Go, go,” Paco said.

  Brett nodded towards the alleyway. They walked side-by-side while she clenched the uneaten kebab.

  “I’m not selling you the painting,” Brett said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it isn’t for sale.”

  “How do you make money if you don’t sell your paintings?”

  “I sell my paintings, just not that one.”

  “Okay, I get it. How much do you want for it?”

  “It isn’t for sale.”

  “Two hundred dollars,” Olivia said.

  Brett laughed. “Two hundred dollars? You think my best paintings go for two hundred?”

  “Fine. Five hundred.”

  “You’re not even in the ballpark.”

  “Then maybe you’d think about giving it to me.”

  “I’m not giving it to you. I’m not giving or selling it to anyone. It’s not going anywhere,” he groaned. “Why do you want it so bad?”

  “Why do you?”

  Brett leaned against a cement wall, looking up at her, his dark eyes sharp as a carpenter’s band saw. A bushy-tailed squirrel darted through planted foliage and scurried up a tree.

  “Because it reminds me of you.”

  She hadn’t expected him to be so candid.

  “So you tell me, Olivia,” Brett said. “Why do you want it?”

  “It reminds me of the best version of myself, the person I am when I’m with you.”

  Brett shook his head no.

  “Why do you say that?” He asked. “If
you feel that way, why did you bolt?”

  He had offered her a job and opened his home to her, but she had had serious doubts about his intentions. He’d been caught red-handed twice with other women, he was openly dating one of them, and she didn’t even know what other intrigues he’d been successful in hiding. Would Carol even be in the picture without her involvement? Did that matter now? The point was Brett was a player, and how could she risk her whole future on a life with a Brett-centric foundation when she didn’t even trust him to keep his dick in his pants? And to throw away her career in finance for an upstart passion for painting? That was ludicrous.

  “Because I can’t trust you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “You’re dating Carol,” she said.

  “I started seeing Carol after you dumped me, if we were even dating at all.”

  “If you really liked me, you wouldn’t have gone home with her that night at Postbellum. If you really liked me, you wouldn’t have started dating her a full ten seconds after that day at Secco.”

  “That’s not fair. What I did after Secco isn’t any of your business.”

  “I caught you hooking up with a girl at your studio like a day after our first kiss.”

  Brett reclined against the vegetation, seemingly indifferent to whether or not he dirtied his clothes. He stretched his arms out, crossing his hands underneath his head.

  He responded in a cool, controlled voice. “What the hell are you talking about? I was infatuated with you. I didn’t hook up with anyone at my studio. I’ve never hooked up with anyone in my studio.”

  “I,” she stuttered, a little thrown by his sincere conviction. “I saw you chasing some half-naked chick around your studio. She was wearing this skanky zebra-striped bathing suit. I saw you dive on top of her on the couch.”

  “When you didn’t show up for your lesson?”

  “Yes.”