To Protect and Serve

Lafayette Street wasn’t very wide but Evie always thought it was bigger than it was. There was too much crammed in for it to be as narrow as it was, cutting its labyrinthine way between Chinatown and Little Italy. Evie, no stranger to metropolises, felt that that was the quintessential city street, the running blocks that spanned the entire world. There was no other reason for why she focused the whole theme of her first show on said street, and why she named them simply the street numbers of each block she painted. No other reason than she liked it, and wanted to capture it.

Evie was about to learn a very important lesson about artistic inspiration. Namely that everyone expects there to be more to it than just that.

The first patron to corner her, babbling questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what does it mean’ drove Evie into the bathroom, anxiety circling her stomach in a tightening snake of panic. She didn’t have any of these answers; she didn’t know what else to say aside from what she had already said. Other people are going to want to know, she thought to herself, the flop sweat she feared more than anything lining her upper lip and catching the light like opals. They’re all going to want to know.

She wished Rachel was with her. Rachel didn’t have an artistic bone in her body so she never bothered Evie with questions of “Where do you get your ideas?” She just accepted that Evie had this talent and was putting it to good use. Nothing more to the story. It was that clear sighted straightforwardness that connected the two of them. Evie was bright eyed and open to inspiration but loathed the idea of explaining it.

“So just laugh and say something enigmatic,” she told her reflection in that fancy gallery bathroom. It was all onyx and polished marble, gilded handles and fixtures that Evie could tell were hollow. She pressed the pad of one finger to the perfectly clean mirror. “You’re the artist. They’re here to see you. Anything you say, they’ll eat it up.”

Her breathing had become shallow, and she tried to return its fullness. There were artists she had worked with or admired who managed to shrug, wave a hand, and shoot off something about the mystery of the process, of being a vessel receptive to genius. Evie gave the whole routine a practice run in the bathroom, studying each move in the mirror, trying to line the feel of the pose up with the look of it. In the end, she felt it looked dumber coming from someone who was obviously playing the role.

“That’s cool,” she managed to laugh, dropping her arms at her sides. “Just be yourself. You’re charming and whatnot. People will get a kick out of you.”

She gave her reflection a once over then dropped her chin into her chest and sighed heavily. If only Rachel would have let her come to this thing in jeans. If only she wasn’t teetering around in heels picked out for her by an eager shopgirl excited for the commission. She should have gone to Chinatown and bought knock-offs like she usually did. That had actually been her plan until Rachel got wind of it and dragged her somewhere filled with glass cases and the sharp alcohol scent of expensive perfume.

After deciding there was no time like the present, and being utterly tired of staring at her own face, Evie headed back out to the main room of the gallery. To her excitement and horror, there were more people on the floor, milling around in lazy, wine-drinking circles. She saw a cluster of heads turned to her, and her heart, which had been rapidly beating up till a second ago, screeched to a halt like a reckless city bus.

“The artist herself,” the curator of the gallery said as Evie stepped out of the shadows of the alcove in which she was hoping to hide out until everyone was gone, “Genevieve Hansen.”

She watched the cluster applaud her in a performative spectacle. One woman held her plastic cup of wine between her teeth in order to free both hands. Evie had to look away so as not to burst out laughing. The woman resembled a trained animal doing a clever trick, her flippers flapping against each other in a bid for her reward.

“You capture humanity very well,” a small light-voiced man told her, putting a cold hand on her arm. “These people in your paintings...it’s like I can see their souls.”

“Thank you,” Evie said, blushing with both genuine embarrassment and pride.

“How did you manage to get this sense of urgency in this one?” the woman who put the cup between her teeth asked. “The runner passing the fishmongers working around the man dragging his food cart. It’s so alive, I could swear it was about to start moving.”

“I take photos first and then go through them and find ones I like.” This was a question Evie could answer. More practical process inquiries, less waxing poetic about ideas and inspiration. “My photography isn’t that great but it doesn’t need to be. The point is to have that moment frozen.”

“Plus, some of us help her.”

Rachel appeared on Evie’s left and bumped into her with her hip. She pouted at her, which Evie knew to read as a smile. Rachel’s lips were heavy and full so even when she was smiling she looked pouty.

Evie hip checked her friend back. “Every artist needs help at some point. I hesitate to use the word muse but if ever I had one-”

“Oh, enough with that malarkey,” Rachel snorted. Her whole family had a habit of using goofy words that made them sound like they were a thousand years old. “All I did was point at the runner and say, ‘boy, is that guy built or what?’”

The cluster laughed politely, and Evie took the chance to pull Rachel away from the crowd and into a quiet corner. She knew there was a time limit anywhere she went. Even when they had only been sitting together for a moment, she could see people whispering to each other and motioning in her direction.

“Jesus god, it feels like high school,” Evie muttered, noticing how Rachel cringed at her using the lord’s name in vain. “Everyone pointing and gossiping together.”

“Except now they’re not saying, ‘look at how weird Evie Hansen is.’ Now, they’re saying, ‘look at that amazing artist. I’ll bet she’s weird.’”

Evie snickered and glanced over at Rachel with narrowed eyes. She wanted to tell her how happy she was to see her, how much more relaxed she was now that Rachel was around, but instead she just leaned her head on Rachel’s shoulder and exhaled as if she had been holding her breath all night.

“You’re going to answer everyone’s questions for me, right?” Evie asked, tugging on the side of Rachel’s immaculately tailored dress. “Anytime someone asks about my inspiration, you can explain it to them.”

“Of course, boo-boo,” Rachel replied in a tone that edged on mocking. She reached over to wind a finger through one of Evie’s trademark curls then retracted her hand when she couldn’t snare one. “Huh, it’s like I forgot your hair was straightened. Isn’t that funny? When I’m not looking at you directly, I can’t even picture you with flat hair.”

“Flat?!” Evie sat upright, arms crossed over her chest. “It’s straightened. Not flat.”

“You know what I mean,” Rachel said, tossing her own hair away from her face. “I’m just not used to you without that halo of lovely curls.”

Neither was Evie, if she was being honest. There had only been a handful of times in her life when she bothered to straighten her hair, and it took forever. This time, she had gotten it done professionally and it still took a total of two hours. But, she had decided after turning her head side to side in the mirror, it was worth it. Her chin length curls had been crafted into a sleek 20’s style wave, and since they hadn’t quite lost their coppery summer glow, they shimmered blond-hinted auburn. Rachel had found her a dark brown dress, declaring it officially time for autumn colors, and made Evie put on makeup. In the end, Evie thought she looked ok but would have much preferred to be comfortable.

“We women are not here to be comfortable,” Rachel told her as she zipped Evie into the sleek, shining dress. “We are here to kick ass and look fantastic.”

Easy for Rachel to say; she always looked fantastic. Tanned and pouty with long dark hair, she turned heads constantly, which is saying something in a city like New York. Plenty of beautiful people strolling around, as Evie was always noticing in her attempts to capture more humanity and souls. It wasn’t hard for someone like Evie, curl-headed with bright green eyes behind round glasses, to feel like she was a face lost in a crowd of millions and millions stacked on top of one another.

Jackson almost flaked on the art opening. He was tired and for a reason he couldn’t figure out, his head was pounding. The aspirin he took did nothing except irritate his stomach. It was almost an hour after that he realized he had taken them without eating anything, then a few moments longer for him to remember that he hadn’t eaten anything that day.

On the way to the gallery, he found a small dim sum place closing up for the day and bought whatever dumplings they had left, eating them out of the oil-logged container as he power walked to the village. Damn arty types making me go out of my way, he thought bitterly. Then he remembered it wasn’t just anybody: it was Evie’s art opening, Rachel’s best friend, and Rachel would murder him if he missed it. She told him as such though she tried to make it sound like a joke. Jackson knew his sister too well to fall for that.

When he entered the gallery, the headache which had slightly abadated came roaring back. The lights alternated from too bright to shadowy, and people moved in chaotic patterns he couldn’t figure out. Just trying to cross the floor he crashed into two different couples. They each regarded him politely, if not particularly warmly, and he was thankful for the fact that Rachel had reminded him to dress nice.

From across the room, in an almost darkened corner, he saw Rachel sitting next to a striking young lady in a chocolate brown dress. If he hadn’t been going that way to see his sister, he would have been drawn in that direction anyway. Whoever the woman was, he couldn’t stop staring at her.

“Rachel,” he called as he got closer. He didn’t raise his voice too much; just enough to get her attention. They had a bad family habit of shouting in quiet situations. Not because they meant to but because they were just used to talking loudly over their big, noisy family. “I made it.”

“So you did,” Rachel said, getting to her feet. The woman next to her stayed seated, her eyes furtively moving around the room. “What do you think of Evie’s work?”

“I didn’t get a chance to check it out yet.”

“She’s the main showcase. There are two other artists but honestly, no one’s hounding them the way they’re hounding her.”

“I guess she’s in hiding, huh?” Jackson craned his neck to survey the room searching for the bobbing head of dark curls and a flash of jeans covered in clay dust and paint. When he came back to Rachel, he noticed how the odd expression she and the young lady next to her were giving him. “What? Where is she?”

With bugged out eyes and an incredulous snort, Rachel pointed down at Evie. She waved meekly then pulled on her dress, letting it snap back against her skin.

“I’m not usually dressed like this,” she told him as if to promise there would be no hard feelings.

“I’ll say.” Jackson cleared his throat and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Evie. I...I don’t think I’ve ever seen you done up so fancy.”

Rachel gingerly touched a stray hair on Evie’s head back into place. “I helped. Or, more accurately, I pointed her in the right direction.”

“I should have guessed as such. Considering that you, my darling sister, are always so ravishing.”

Rachel gave another snort at that, slapping Jackson’s shoulder with the back of her hand. The two of them had grown up close and gotten closer as adults. In a big, loud family, allyship is as precious as attention or time alone in the bathroom.

Evie squirmed a little. She inched one side of her hips up then rested it back down. Jackson thought she looked like she was trying to adjust her underwear without anyone noticing but when she stood up, it was more obvious than he cared to admit that she wasn’t wearing any.

“I can’t wait till I’m famous enough that I can come to one of these in my normal clothes and everyone will just think I’m eccentric and delightfully quirky.” Evie straightened her dress as well as she could. “I’m super thankful that all of this is happening and just thrilled that people like my work but I’d rather be at home making more art. Hobnobbing isn’t a skill they teach you at art school.”

“They should,” Rachel said, her eyes now locked on a man across the room. “That way at least they’d be teaching you something useful.”

Now it was Jackson’s turn to land a slap. Rachel brushed his hand off her shoulder and fluttered her fingers at him dismissively. “Evie knows I’m joking.”

“You can go introduce yourself, Rachel,” Evie told her, almost hushed and embarrassed to be noticing her friend’s wandering eyes. “I should really face the masses and do another round myself.”

“As long as you’re ok with it,” Rachel responded but she was already cutting through the crowd to the spot right next to a wealthy looking dark haired man staring intently at one of Evie’s small earth colored sculptures.

Jackson extended his arm for Evie to take, and they re-entered the polite noise of art patrons sipping and whispering and crisping into the starchy snacks laid out for them. It wasn’t the first time Jackon was at an art opening but he struggled to think of another one he had been to. Growing up in the city, art was everywhere, and even though he himself never really sought it out, there were friends with shows and college girlfriends doing performance pieces in some warehouse in Brooklyn. For his money, this was the first one he had been to where he was sure the artist in question was going to be a success.

Evie stopped in front of the first piece of the Lafayette series. It was a frozen moment of two cops buying pastries from a Chinese bakery. The bakery was one of those long buildings with no doors on the front; just a metal sheet that came down like a garage when it was time to close. The one cop was paused in a peal of laughter shared by the old couple working behind the counter. The other cop already had his purchase in his mouth and was balancing the wax paper bag in the same hand as his coffee.

“You did this?” Jackson asked, leaning in as far as he figured he was allowed to go.

“Yeah, it was the first in this series. It made me realize I could do a million paintings just of Lafayette Street and never run out of interesting subjects.”

Jackson studied the two cops in the painting, amazed at how specific yet ordinary they looked. He felt like he was staring at an image of himself and his late partner even though neither of them fit the description of the men in the image. It occurred to him that there was more universality than he cared to admit; that a picture of cops laughing with a store owner while buying pastries and coffee could look exactly like people he knew just because the action was familiar.

A small shiver passed through him, nothing Evie noticed (at least he hoped), and he wanted more than anything to get away from that painting. He moved along to the next one, Evie’s arm still connected by the crook of their elbows.

“I guess I never really got to see much of your work, Evie,” Jackson said as he studied the next one, faking the intensity with which he had inspected the one with the cops. “Maybe, like, a sculpture or something from your student days but nothing on this level. It’s really something else.”

“Thanks, I worked really hard on it.” She allowed herself an inspection of her own but of Jackson’s attire and freshly shaved jawline. “And thanks for dressing nice for the event. You clean up well.”

Jackson did the same snort Rachel always did. “Right back at ya, kid.” He smirked, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look like this.”

“Like an adult?”

“Yeah but more than that.”

He ended his thought there. No need to tell her that he had literally never seen the shape of her body before; that he was surprised at how lean and toned her arms were and that he was fitting the lines together in his head as to what her slender torso looked like stretched out on a bed. His bed. Her bed with him in it.

Jackson cleared his throat, hoping the image in his mind would move along with the noise he made. It didn’t really work, and he silently hoped Evie couldn’t read his thoughts as they studied her work until they were flanked with fans and buyers hoping for a second of her time.