“It most certainly is. I just have one question.”
“What?”
“Who’s Antler Thorn? Because I wouldn’t have pegged you as the type to be getting calls from gay porn stars. And Antler Thorn sure as hell sounds like a gay porn star.”
“It’s a gallery. The one Garrison told us about, remember? AntlerThorn. One word.”
She says this as if it makes much, much more sense as one word.
“That’s awesome, right?” I say. I don’t know much about the art world, but having a gallery want you must be like being scouted by the majors, at least.
“It is awesome. Except it’s also weird. Because it’s a lie that’s coming true. The only person who thought I was having a gallery show was Violet. And now a gallery wants me to have a show there.”
As we head to her car, she explains more of the backstory. I do not tell her that I am slightly distracted thinking of some of the outfits that Antler Thorn, Gay Porn Star™, would wear. I’m not sure she’d appreciate that.
I also know that Ryan would. I almost want to text him and ask him what he thinks when he hears the phrase Antler Thorn.
Then I imagine him responding:
Let me see what Taylor says.
I have to stop. I am spiraling into ridiculousness.
We’re at Katie’s car now. She points to this big, big zip-up envelope thing sitting on the passenger seat.
“I want you to look through those and pick the twelve I should show them.”
We get in the car and I tell her, “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. Ryan’s the art person, not me. If you want to go through it, I’m happy to drive.…”
She shakes her head. “If I try to go through it, it will take me about twelve hours, and at the end of the twelve hours I’ll be certain I am the most pathetic excuse for a non-artist in the history of everything. That’s just the way it is. And we don’t have twelve hours—I am supposed to be there by four. Because they’re doing this show of queer artists, and apparently one of the photographers had to take down his pieces because they were all reproductions of his cheating boyfriend’s Grindr chats, pictures included, and the boyfriend is threatening to sue.”
“Fortune does have a strange way of smiling, doesn’t it?” I say, unzipping the carrier. She’s going to have to drive fast if we’re going to make it downtown by four.
I really don’t know anything about painting. I don’t know whether the colors I see are right or if the shapes make sense. I couldn’t tell you which painters Katie is like or what style she’s painting in. But almost immediately I can tell one very important thing about Katie’s paintings: She means them.
I feel like I’m reading her journal. A journal made of poems, where the spaces and word arrangements are just as important as the words themselves. These paintings are not still lifes. There is nothing still about the life within them. Everything she’s pictured has elements that are present and elements that are missing—you feel the presence and the absence and have to figure out whether the figures are almost complete or just starting to dissolve. A rope stretching across the sky, with a girl trying to balance atop it. The rope is solid, but neither end is attached to anything. In another painting there’s a girl peering into a ring of fire. You can see her face all around the hoop, but when you look inside it there’s a starry sky where her eye should be.
A Pegasus with only one wing, turning toward the ground.
A starfish with a missing limb … but it’s the missing limb that you feel reaching toward a comet.
A lion with a whip for a tail.
An elephant trying to curve its trunk around a crescent moon.
And then, in the next painting, the crescent moon trying to curve itself around the elephant.
She’s painted these things as if every single one of them is real.
“I should turn the car around, shouldn’t I?” Katie says when I’ve been silent for too long.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I reply.
Katie seems satisfied by this.
“It’s just a lot for me to take in,” she says. “It’s one thing when your friends are seeing it. Or people at school. But with strangers—it opens up something else. It gives a whole different dimension to it. Because suddenly the art has to stand for itself. That’s weird to me.”
“You’ve had plenty of scrimmages with your team, but now this is the game,” I say.
“Yes. This is the game.”
I sense there’s something else she’s not saying. So I go, “And?”
“And … I can’t help thinking it’s tied to her. None of this would have happened without her.”
“None of it would have happened without you, either.”
“I know. But I guess my point is that it’s the combination. Her and me equals this. However directly or indirectly. This.”
We drive a while longer, letting Sky Ferreira and Lorde do the singing for us. I finish looking at her art—even though I’m strictly amateur, there are some pieces that can be eliminated easily. Rough sketches that are rough because they haven’t found their subject yet. Assignments that feel like assignments. A collage that’s supposed to be political but only ends up being obvious.
“Have you made your choices?” Katie asks.
I can’t believe she trusts me. But I nod anyway.
“Good,” she says. “Keep those in the portfolio and throw the rest in the backseat.”