The Love of My (Other) Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

of those people?”
    “That’s so archaeological,” sniffed Gates. His words punctured my happy Renaissance bubble.
    I stood, once again, in Chelsea, in a gallery filled with tawdry baubles that some sneering, condescending, punitive, mentally challenged art demi-god had deemed worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
    “There’s nothing archaeological about beauty.”
    “If you want beauty, take a taxi to the Met. I thought you admired Cliff Bucknell; you had such an obvious emotional response to his work.” Gates looked wounded.
    “Cliff Bucknell is a has-been fraud,” I said.
    That pushed Gates over the edge. He turned on his heel and flounced off.
    I trailed him. I heard a noise behind me as someone came in, but I didn’t turn my head to look. I was too intent on reaching Gates, on somehow making him understand what he, the art community, and the world at large needed to know: that art isn’t about irony and wit and commercialism and fashionableness and all that superficial glamour that means nothing and goes nowhere fast. Art is about something deeper, more real. Something transcendental that shows us the way to our better, truer selves. Art is about beauty. Art is about meaning.
    The meaning to which art inspires us is worth drastic action.
    Gates was mincing rapidly away. I grabbed his arm and yanked him around to look at some ghastly purple still lifes. I said, passionately, “People only buy this stuff because it matches their curtains!”
    “What kind of hair are you shedding?” Gates wondered, staring at my jacket. “You need a new hairdresser.”
    “Mr. Gates, there are artists who have studied their craft and developed their aesthetic out of a valid tradition and who have something to say that isn’t pedestrian!”
    Gates held his hand to his forehead and honked.
    “I’m getting a sinus headache. Is the barometric pressure dropping?”
    What the hell, why couldn’t he hear me? I grabbed him by the collar and shook him. “You can show meaningful art!”
    “Not if I want to make a living,” he responded.
    He wriggled out of my grasp and closeted himself in his office.
    They came in a tidal wave: disgust, anger, sadness—all my old feelings about the silly triviality into which art had degenerated since Marcel Duchamp did us all a disservice and foisted a urinal on us, which had a minute and a half of shock value before the novelty wore off. I mean, it’s been more that a hundred years, and artists, with their lack of originality and creativity, are still doing that urinal. I wandered back to the skull.
    Then I couldn’t breath. What?
    I was ensconced in a bear-hug like an iron corset.
    “Like that skull? It’s only a million dollars,” chirped Brian.
    “I hate it, and I want it to go die in a hole,” I whispered, struggling and wheezing for air. “Didn’t I tell you to get lost?”
    “How do you know you’re a physicist? You avoid stirring your coffee because you don’t want to increase the entropy of the universe,” Brian asked and answered his own joke. Then he chuckled. That’s right, he was crazy.
    “How crazy and delusional are you?” I demanded.
    I froze, and maybe the sudden cessation of motion caused him to release me. I drew in a big sweet lungful of oxygen. I was happy to breathe freely. I was also incomprehensibly glad to see Brian—which really pissed me off.
    “What I mean to say is, physicists think for themselves. You can’t just tell them what to do. It used to drive you crazy.” He picked up the skull and shook it next to his ear. “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Tessa, a fellow of infinite jest.”
    “Put that down,” I hissed and grabbed his arm.
    “The rhinestones will come off. It’s only Elmer’s glue.”
    “Here, didn’t you ever want to hold a million bucks in your hand?” Brian thrust the objet d’art into my hand.
    I gawked. I was overwhelmed by a welter of feelings: disgust, envy, and other, fiercer emotions. I turned it over and over in