needs to be reminded of that.
“Uh-huh.” Jess shakes her head. “Never thought I’d hear you going in for slut-shaming, though.”
Bronca flinches. Oh fuck, she did, didn’t she? But she is angry—righteously, petulantly angry—and it’s making her fall back on old bad habits. Like getting defensive when she knows she’s in the wrong. “Bitch has bad taste. I could see it if she fucked men who were worth something.”
Jess rolls her eyes. “And now with the ‘bitch.’ Also, you think all men are shit.”
“My son’s okay.” But this is an old joke between them, and Bronca feels herself relaxing, which is probably Jess’s goal. “I just… Fuck, Jess.”
Jess shakes her head. “Nobody can deny what you’ve done for this place, Bronca. Not even Yijing. Cool the fuck down, though, okay? Then let’s talk later about the grant. Right now I’ve got a problem brewing, and I’m gonna need you on your game.”
It’s exactly what Bronca needs to hear. She feels herself focusing, thoughts climbing out of their grim spiral (If I’m irrelevant, is it because I’m old? Is this how my career ends, with a whimper instead of a bang? All I ever wanted was to give meaning to the world) as she straightens and flicks imaginary lint off her denim jacket to compose herself. “Yeah, okay. What’s going on?”
“New artists’ group wants to do a show. They’re connected to a big donor, so Raul’s on it like a fly on shit. But the art is…” She grimaces.
“What? We’ve shown bad art before.” Every publicly funded artist space has to, occasionally.
“This is worse.” And there’s something to the set of Jess’s shoulders that finally does pull Bronca out of her own navel. She’s never seen Jess truly angry, but it’s there now underneath her professional veneer, along with affront and disgust. “So get it together and get out here.” She closes the bathroom door and leaves.
Bronca sighs and glances at the mirror, more out of habit than any real concern for how she looks. Okay, she looks calm. Jess is going to want her to make up with Yijing soon, but that only makes sense; the Center’s staff is small, and everybody has to be able to work together. Still, though…
“‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre,’” says a woman’s soft voice. As Bronca stiffens, belatedly realizing some poor sapette has been trapped in a stall this whole time by their argument, the voice laughs. This is bright, delighted laughter, almost infectious in its pleasantry. For a moment Bronca feels herself smile, too, but then she wonders what’s so funny, and stops.
There’s a row of six stalls in the women’s room, and the three at the far end are shut. Bronca doesn’t lean down to look for feet, mostly because she doesn’t want to discover that there are three people who’ve gotten stuck listening to her and Yijing. “Sorry about the yelling,” Bronca calls to the closed stalls. “Got carried away.”
“It happens,” replies the voice. Low, husky, despite the high-pitched laughter. It’s a Lauren Bacall voice. Bronca loves Lauren Bacall’s voice and has since she was a baby dyke. “Yijing is just young. Doesn’t want to show respect like she should, to her elders. One must respect elders.”
“Well, yeah.” Abruptly Bronca realizes she doesn’t recognize the voice. “Uh, sorry, have we met?”
“So often, ‘the falcon cannot hear the falconer.’” Another of those little ripples of laughter. And no answer.
Bronca scowls. This must be another of Yijing’s pretentious little NYU friends. “Yeah? I can quote Yeats, too. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world—’”
“‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’!” The voice is positively gleeful now. “‘And everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned…’ Ah, that’s my favorite line. Gets right at the shallow performativity of so many things, don’t you think? Innocence is nothing but a ceremony, after all. So strange that you people venerate it the way you do. What other world celebrates not knowing anything about how life really works?” A soft laugh-sigh. “How your species managed to get this far, I will never know.”
Bronca is… not liking this conversation. For a minute she sort of thought the unknown woman was flirting with her. Now, though, she’s pretty sure the woman in the stall is doing something other than flirting. Something closer to dropping veiled threats.
Don’t get into it with patrons, she reminds herself, fussing with her hair in the mirror to displace anxiety. The hubs used to joke that she was