dick. I can’t physically speak. Then I spun it around so Gladys could read it.
I saw annoyance and pity battling it out on her face. Annoyance won. “That’s no excuse for being obscene. Eight dollars each, please.”
Zelda threw yet another hundred down onto the counter and headed into the museum without looking back.
“That was hilarious,” she said, once we were out of Gladys’s earshot. “What did you write to her, anyway?” I showed Zelda the journal. She laughed loudly, drawing stares from a couple of humorless museumgoers. “You should get that printed on a T-shirt, so you can wear it around all day. Do people often respond to you like that?”
All the time.
“But you refuse to go back to speech therapy.”
I shrugged.
“Curiouser and curiouser, Parker Santé. And you act like I’m the mysterious one.”
We entered a small, brightly lit room. A few run-of-the-mill bronze sculptures were mounted here and there, but the focal point was the enormous organ up against the wall. It had two big panels on either side of the keyboard, both of which were as dense with buttons, levers, and switches as the cockpit of a jumbo jet.
“The Skinner organ,” Zelda said. “It cost over a hundred thousand dollars to build, which would be more than a million dollars today. They bring a man to play it every weekend. In fact, he should be here any minute. You see up there?” She pointed at a section of the wall above the room’s entrance. “That’s canvas, painted to look like brick. All the pipes are hidden back there. Trompe l’oeil, it’s called. A trick of the eye.”
I never would’ve noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out, but now I could see the whole panel shivering with the draft. Funny, Zelda really did seem to know a lot of stuff. Art and history. French and Spanish and who knew what other languages. All of it very much in keeping with the story I’d promised her I now believed. I felt my faithometer nudge up to 38 percent.
“Come on,” Zelda said. “Let’s check out the exhibit.”
I always get crazy tired in museums. I don’t know what it is. Something about the air, or the light, or maybe just all that ART, coming at you like machine-gun fire—bam, bam, bam—all those haloed saints and weeping Marys and bleeding Jeses (that’s the plural of Jesus, right?) and yawn-inducing landscapes and dead chickens. Not to mention all that fucking fruit. Seriously, what is the deal with the fruit? Who decided that the best subject for art was a bunch of grapes and a pomegranate in a silver bowl? That guy ought to be beaten to death with an unripe pear.
Usually the only thing that keeps me awake is all the nudity. Though not nearly as common as bowls of fruit, naked ladies tend to feature very prominently in your average museum. You’ve got your life-size marble sculptures of naked ladies, still somehow as white as a fresh bar of soap. You’ve got your oil paintings of naked ladies frolicking under waterfalls. You’ve got your blocky cubist naked ladies that you only know are naked ladies because the title is something like “Naked Lady Descending Stairs.” I can still remember those middle-school field trips, where we’d be corralled into a conga line and ordered to follow some boring-ass tour guide from room to room, and how everyone would get all nervous and blushy around the naked ladies. I liked to hang back and touch the paintings when no one was looking. It was an early and important lesson in the limited capabilities of watchmen. I’ve stroked the stone thighs of some seriously ancient statues in my day, and nobody’s even raised an eyebrow. Teachers and museum guards put on a big show—“Don’t touch this or you’ll get in trouble!”—but the truth is, they don’t stand a chance against us. They’re the 300, and we’re the fucking Persians.
Anyway, I didn’t want Zelda to know I wasn’t a regular museumite, so I did my best to overcome my fruit-bowl-inspired sleepiness and look attentive. The exhibit was focused on this guy named Georges Seurat, who painted pictures with tons of little dots, like pixels on a computer screen. I wandered around, glancing at every painting for a few seconds, then moving on to the next one. Meanwhile, Zelda had stopped to stare at this one painting for, like, five minutes, so eventually I went over to see what it was. Study for a Sunday on La Grand