Alexis Latner - Threat of Stars at 912 Main

She wore a short vermilion dress and—something I check when women seem to exceed me in height—flat shoes. Tall lady. “Michael, can I show you something really odd?”

To my exasperation, Tam led me back to Roger’s mixed media. Pointing to the giant plastic cockroach stuck onto the side of the mess, Tam said, “I think that moved.”

I gave a cynical chuckle. “It’s not alive—not even Houston has roaches that big. It’s a novelty from the party supply store on South Main street.”

“What I meant was, the whole part moved.”

“Then maybe the orange goop is melting.”

She laughed. An attractive laugh, a mezzo-soprano fugue, it triggered an automatic assess-the-competition exercise. Roger—elegantly tall, with dramatic pale skin and dark hair—was not in the market for women. Thaddeus had a Mrs. Cooper. But Ben Glaze was single and an impressively brawny man. Ben could have been a football player. I, on the other hand, had the compact build of a male gymnast. Which, in point of fact, I used to be, in college. If Tam went for Ben’s kind of physique, I would be way out of luck. On the other hand…

Here was a welcome preoccupation to edge out the bigger, badder, loose-baggy-monster worries about life, art and theft. So I took testosterone up on its suggestion. I leaned closer to whisper, sotto voce, “It’s supposed to slowly melt because it’s a statement about deconstruction.”

Tam laughed. “It’s not melting. There’s a motor inside it.”

She was beautiful—a tall, brown-eyed blonde in a red dress. I could feel wine going to my head and libido going to other places.

The mixed media’s perpetrator interrupted my efforts at courtship. Roger announced to everyone in the gallery, “My friends, it’s almost time for this opening to close. Drink up!”

Having seen to it that the white wine, which was considering turning to vinegar, had been killed off, Roger ushered everybody out. He let Annika’s cat, Triptych, out of the back room to have the run of the place. I noticed that Roger locked the gallery’s front door with care, testing it with a sharp tug.

A few of us, including Tam, adjourned to the cafe across the street. We took a table by the plate glass window. The darkened facade on the other side of the street said HART GALLERY in the splash of headlights from the occasional car going by.

As she spooned white froth off her cappuccino, Tam asked, “Why are we sitting here? Are we guarding the gallery?”

“Should we be?” I replied.

Across the table from us sat Ben Glaze with a new friend: the art babe in the blue dress. She was clinging to Ben’s arm much as the dress clung to her breasts. Ben seemed dazzled.

Tam said, “I keep trying to figure out what the thefts have in common. What’s the why?”

I replied, “You know, there’s one more theft to take into account.” Having captured everybody’s attention, even Ben’s, I continued, deadpan, “I read about it in my parents’ subdivision newspaper. There was an arts and crafts exhibit in Westwood Mall, from which a collage was stolen. It was a ‘Texas’ theme piece with dried blue-bonnets, barbed wire and sepia photographs in a mesquite wood frame.”

Ben snorted like a Texas javelina. “Arts and crap doesn’t count!”

“If anybody’s low-down enough to be a thief, why should they have good taste in art?” Tam countered. “Is there somebody who’d have a reason to steal all of the pieces that are missing, including the collage?”

The girl on Ben’s arm chirped, “Tourists! You know how undiscriminating they can be about weird souvenirs. And sometimes they just take things without asking. It must be tourists from Romania or somewhere like that.” She proceeded to reclaim Ben’s undivided attention by snuggling his brawny arm into her blue-sheathed bosom.

I asked Tam, “Are you worried?”

“That would be paranoid.” Cradling the cappuccino cup in her hands, she sighed. “You have to be able tc sell art, or give it away, or throw it away when it isn’t any good. But one of the pieces over there means a lot to me.”

“Technology Number 7?”

She nodded. “ ‘Tech 7’ is the best in the series. And it took a long time to do, to get just right. I feel invested in it.”

Ben’s new girlfriend caused him to lose whatever interest he had in guard duty. They left. Which was fine by me. “I get invested too,” I confided. “It takes me hours to photograph and sketch buildings from different angles in order to understand them well enough to paint them.”

“I make friends with scientists and engineers and watch them use their instruments and equipment in the lab. It wasn’t until I went and watched a scientific glassblower at Rice University that I understood the beaker and the crucible in ‘Tech 7’ well enough to paint them.”

“Good, because art should be truth about the world. It’s not just about my feelings, what I feel. It’s about what I see.” There was Michael Martin’s philosophy and highest aspiration, tucked into a nutshell.

“I believe that, too.” She looked into my eyes.

The evening, while not young, wasn’t all that old. And the cafe was cozily romantic. I ventured, “Is your name Tamara?”

“On my birth certificate it’s Tammy Ruth Adkins, born in Union Springs, Alabama. But I don’t want to be called Tammy or Ruth either one.” I recognized the Southern accent in her voice with a thrill, as though I had made a rare and wonderful discovery.

A ring-and-bracelet-bedecked hand clapped my shoulder. Startled, I nearly jumped out of the booth before a familiar, throaty alto voice said, “I thought I’d find some of you hanging around in here.”

With irritation, I looked up at Annika Hart, whose timing could have been infinitely better. “Hi.”

“How was the opening? Did Roger get everything set up in time?”

“Yeah, but why did you let Roger put that Mixed Media of his in an otherwise outstanding show?”

“It’s not Roger’s,” said Tam. “Roger and I decided Thaddeus did it. It symbolizes anonymous, black urban vigor—the resurrection of the crap of the city.”

“But it isn’t Thaddeus’s.” I frowned. “He and I were talking about it behind Roger’s back.”

“What Mixed Media?” Annika asked.

I said, “The one in the comer where the bad light made it look better.”

“I know about the bad lighting. I don’t display anything important in that comer,” said Annika.

“Whose is it really?” Tam asked. “How does it work?”

“What do you mean, it works?” said Annika.

“You have to watch for a while. Some parts slide around relative to each other, in a way that isn’t a simple motor. Michael, I was showing you that just before Roger closed up the opening. I’ve never seen an art show with a motorized thingie in it. Is that a trend in Houston?”

Annika said emphatically, “No, and I would not display a motorized thingie in my gallery.”

Slightly laced with alcohol and caffeine and in a suddenly unsettled mood, I said, “It’s there. Let us in and we’ll show you.”

Annika cleared her throat. “All right. The reputation of my establishment is at stake.” Barging out of the cafe in front of us, Annika declared, “If somebody whom I did not invite to this show has left a calling card behind my back, in the form of a motorized thingie like a tacky display in a Christmas window—out in the trash it goes!”

The warm night air wrapped a around us like velvet, reminding me that in the summer in Houston the time to be outdoors, and romantic, is at night. The problem was that in this end of downtown, as late as it was by then, there’s no night life. The cafe we’d just stepped out of was the only business open for blocks around.