Rabih Alameddine - I, The Divine

“Don’t listen to her,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the tub. “It was an unmitigated catastrophe. There was a fistfight, for crying out loud. Guys were punching each other at my opening. How can that be wonderful?”

“Did you know the men?” Saniya asked.

“No, she didn’t know them,” Dina added. “They were just guys who walked in off the street. It wasn’t a big deal. The show looked fabulous, Saniya. It was gorgeous. You’d have been proud of her.”

“What do you mean no big deal? People were slugging each other at the opening. How can that not be a big deal?” I wanted to get out of the bathroom and slug Dina myself.

“Let’s just say her paintings had an extreme effect on viewers,” Dina added. “The show elicited visceral reactions. Emotions were flying all over the place.” Saniya began giggling at the other end. I was jealous that my stepmother and my best friend got along so well.

The evening was a disaster. Dina and I left our hotel at five-thirty. We took the subway from Seventy-second Street and got off at Fourteenth to avoid the midtown crush and then frantically searched for a cab to take us down to SoHo. We arrived too early. The reception was from six till eight. One of the gallery assistants was still sweeping the floor.

The gallery had three rooms with three different exhibits. Mine was in the main room. In the smaller gallery there was a group exhibit of New York artists, both paintings and sculptures. In the smallest room was a conceptual exhibit by a Russian émigré.

By six o’clock, no one had arrived. The wine, however, was on the table. There were, count them, six jugs of cheap white wine. The only other thing to drink was tap water in pitchers. The gallery had gone all out. The owner must have spent all of twenty dollars.

By six-fifteen, strange-looking men started arriving. The elevator door would open, and a couple of haggard, wretched-looking men would pour out. They did not look at my paintings, but walked straight to the smaller gallery where the wine was. The other artists from the group show soon followed, every one of them dressed in black, looking pretentious and self-important. They too began to drink. Everybody congregated in the small room, and no one was looking at my paintings. I went to the table to get myself a glass of wine, but almost gagged when I tasted it. It was fructose-laced vinegar. I threw the plastic cup in the wastebasket only to be glared at by two of the men for wasting precious liquid.

I ran back to Dina and whispered. “They’re winos. These guys are here for the free wine.”

“Sure looks like it,” she said, amused.

Thankfully, some friends from my college days in New York arrived. They loved my paintings and we were distracted for a while. The other gallery was full, everybody hanging around the wine table, when a fistfight broke out. One of the winos punched another. The punchee gulped down what was left in his glass and jumped the puncher. They dragged each other around the small gallery, each man using a headlock on the other. One of the artists, a skinny, acne-faced, effeminate young man, jumped up and down, screaming hysterically, “Watch out for my sculpture,” a traffic-department wooden sawhorse covered with sheepskin. He tried to direct the combatants away from his chef d’oeuvre without daring to get within reach of them. The owner of the gallery did not budge from his seat. Finally, a couple of the other winos separated the two. One guy, a South Asian, took the man who lost the fight out of the gallery. For the next hour, until the wine ran out, the South Asian came up to the gallery and left with two glasses of wine every ten minutes.

None of my friends stayed for more than a couple of minutes. I could not blame them. I wanted to leave my own opening. Two drunks, probably homeless, stood in front of one my paintings. One said to the other in a loud and quivering voice, “These are awesome paintings. They keep moving.” He was barely able to keep himself standing, swaying from side to side.

“See.” Dina nudged me. “They get it.” She was taking everything a little too lightly.

“They’re moving because you’re drunk,” the second man said, slurring his words. He could handle his alcohol much better than his friend. “There’s color interplay here, but I don’t think you’re sober enough to see it. These paintings are informed by Mondrian as well as by the hard-edged abstract school that came out of Los Angeles. I think they’d have worked better if they weren’t all so uniform.”

Dina cracked up. I wanted to kill them. I actually moved in their direction to give them a piece of my mind, but Dina held me back.

“Only in New York,” she said. “Let it go and enjoy it. This is only the reception. As you can see, no one who loves art will show up tonight.”

A group of Russians, friends of the conceptual artist from the smallest gallery, went out the fire-exit door carrying their own bottles of vodka, wanting to smoke. Shortly thereafter, they began singing Soviet anthems. We could hear the singing clearly, though muffled, coming from behind the wall. The first drunk looked at his friend. “These paintings are singing now,” he said.

“That’s really weird,” his friend replied.

I freaked. I wanted to leave right then. The two walked back to the table and realized the wine was all gone. Within a couple of minutes, the gallery emptied. All that remained were a couple of artists, the gallery owner, and Russian songs. I walked out fuming, went to a bar and got drunk. To add insult to injury, my own mother, my only relative who lived in New York, did not show up at my reception.

I was telling the whole story to Saniya, with Dina doing color commentary on the other phone, when I felt the Xanax kick in. It was timely: I began to see the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

“The show will get good reviews,” Dina told Saniya. “The opening won’t influence that.”

“I’d better hang up,” Saniya said. “I’m sure everyone will want to call and find out what happened.”

She was right. The instant we hung up the phone, it rang again. It was my sister Amal from Beirut. I let Dina talk to her and tell her the whole story, while I dried my hair. I remembered the spider and checked the tub to see if it was still there. Didn’t see it. I looked around and nothing. I figured it must have died and was swept down the drain. All of a sudden it occurred to me to look at my butt. There the poor spider was, squished, looking like an intriguing tattoo on my ass.

I came back to the room wearing the hotel’s bathrobe.

“That looks nice,” Dina said. She sat on the edge of the bed. “We should filch it.”

I put my hands to my face, screamed a high note, but not too loudly. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” I had to shout that every time I saw her without makeup. It was our ritual.

“Shut the fuck up.” That too was part of the ritual. She stood up and went into the bathroom.

The phone rang. It was my half-brother, Ramzi, calling from San Francisco. He wanted to know everything. He was taking care of my cat and plants and told me I owned, without a doubt, the stupidest cat in the world.

The phone rang again. It was my half-sister Majida from Beirut. I had to tell her the same story. I was feeling fine and I told the whole story as one long joke. I could hear her and her husband laughing across the line.

By the time my ex-husband Joe called from Dallas, I had the story down. I was laughing hysterically with him on the phone. My ex-husband Omar called from Beirut. Ditto. We laughed so hard, Dina came out of the bathroom and handed me tissues to dry my eyes.

“Did everybody call?” Dina asked, while getting dressed. “Let’s go out for coffee.”