taking in the odd air of the house, each wall peeling and cracked and stained in a different way, communicating some wound left by inhabitants past and present. (You can’t expect college kids to hire a painter.)
Ryan pointed to a young woman, fingering the handle of a knife plunged into a wooden cutting board littered with limes by the sink. She chatted with one of the many sunglassed clones that infested the house. Her honey blonde hair was cropped closely to her skull in a pixie cut, her eyes camouflaged by a generous amount of smoky blackness. Silver fly swatters dangled from her earlobes to the tips of her shoulders. She resembled Edie Sedgwick, or, more accurately, a girl dressed up as her for Halloween.
“Hi, darling.” Ryan air-kissed each of her cheekbones, shooing away the bro behind him. “This is Alexander, the fashion critic I told you about, the next Anna Wintour.”
I cringed—Ryan had a knack for glamorizing my life in an effort to impress his friends. Writing a few reviews of fashion shows for blogs over the years hardly makes one the successor of American Vogue.
We shook hands, her left never losing grip on the knife.
“Where’s your piece? All I can find are these closeted homos, not that I terribly mind,” he said as he eyed a boy whose shamrock-covered boxers sprouted up from the jeans clinging around his thighs.
“Sorry to drag you here.” Margot took a sip of her PBR. “I thought this was being held in a warehouse, not a frat house.”
With the bearing of a curator, she showed us her pieces, wigs on Styrofoam heads whose milky mounds of eyes gazed up at the cracked molding of the ceiling, the long locks—that looked nothing like actual hair—cascading downward in waves and folds. The wigs were made of shredded fabric, yarn, corn fibers and threads, something Margot hoped would symbolize the dovetailing of woman’s vanity and vocation. I nodded to appease her—then excused myself and slipped out onto a large balcony.
