a speedy blur of green-orange hair and psychedelic tank-top. “Ouggghhh, I’m gonna EEEEJECT!”
“Gert, that’s enough,” a voice said quietly. It was Anna Stevenson, standing at the foot of the stairs. She was once again dressed in black and white (Rosie had seen her in other combinations, but not many), this time tapered black pants and a white silk blouse with long sleeves and a high neck. Rosie envied her elegance. She always envied Anna’s elegance.
Looking slightly ashamed of herself, Gert set Cynthia gently back on her feet.
“I’m okay, Anna,” Cynthia said. She wobbled four zigzag steps across the mat, stumbled, sat down, and began to giggle.
“I see you are,” Anna said dryly.
“I flipped Gert,” she said. “You should have seen it. I think it was the thrill of my life. Honestly.”
“I’m sure it was, but Gert would tell you she flipped herself,” Anna said. “You just helped her do what her body wanted to do already.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Cynthia said. She got cautiously to her feet, then promptly plumped back down on her fanny (what there was of it) and giggled some more. “God, it’s like someone put the whole room on a record-player.”
Anna came across the room to where Rosie and Pam were sitting. “What have you got there?” she asked Rosie.
“A picture. I bought it this afternoon. It’s for my new place, when I get it. My room.” And then, a little fearfully, she added: “What do you think?”
“I don’t know—let’s get it into the light.”
Anna picked the picture up by the sides of the frame, carried it across the room, and set it on the Ping-Pong table. The five women gathered around it in a semicircle. No, Rosie saw, glancing around, now they were seven. Robin St. James and Consuelo Delgado had come downstairs and joined them—they were standing behind Cynthia, looking over her narrow, bird-boned shoulders. Rosie waited for someone to break the silence—she was betting on Cynthia—and when nobody did and it began to spin out, she started feeling nervous.
“Well?” she asked at last. “What do you think? Somebody say something.”
“It’s an odd picture,” Anna said.
“Yeah,” Cynthia agreed. “Weird. I think I seen one like it before, though.”
Anna was looking at Rosie. “Why did you buy it, Rosie?”
Rosie shrugged, feeling more nervous than ever. “I don’t know that I can explain, really. It was like it called to me.”
Anna surprised her—and eased her considerably—by smiling and nodding. “Yes. That’s really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures—it’s the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads. But this particular painting... is it beautiful to you, Rosie?”
Rosie looked at it, trying to see it as she had in the Liberty City Loan & Pawn, when its silent tongue had spoken to her with such force that she had been stopped cold, all other thoughts driven from her mind. She looked at the blonde woman in the rose madder toga (or chiton—that was what Mr. Lefferts had called it) standing in the high grass at the top of the hill, again noting the plait which hung straight down the middle of her back and the gold armlet above her right elbow. Then she let her gaze move to the ruined temple and the tumbled
(god)
statue at the foot of the hill. The things the woman in the toga was looking at.
How do you know that’s what she’s looking at? How can you know? You can’t see her face!
That was true, of course ... but what else was there to look at?
“No,” Rosie said. “I didn’t buy it because it was beautiful to me. I bought it because it seemed powerful to me. The way it stopped me in my tracks was powerful. Does a picture have to be beautiful to be good, do you think?”
“Nope,” Consuelo said. “Think about Jackson Pollock. His stuff wasn’t about beauty, it was about energy. Or Diane Arbus, how about her?”
“Who’s she?” Cynthia asked.
“A photographer who got famous taking pictures of women with beards and dwarves smoking cigarettes.”
“Oh.” Cynthia thought this over, and her face suddenly brightened with recollection. “I saw this picture once, at a catered party back when I was cocktailing. In an art gallery, this was. It was by some guy named Applethorpe, Robert Applethorpe, and you want to know what it was? One guy gobbling another guy’s crank! Seriously! And