Kwan Kevin - Sex and Vanity

“Lucie, I’m absolutely floored by this work. I’m so impressed.”

“Really?” Lucie looked up at him blankly.

“You’ve only been painting for a year?”

“No, I’ve been doing art since I was very young, and I took art classes all through high school.”

“Your work is … dare I say … sui generis. It’s original, sophisticated, and fresh, and more importantly, I feel that you are channeling your soul into these paintings. I can’t wait to see the real canvases. Why, I’d love to buy one of your works and hang it at the new studio in East Hampton!”

Lucie’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I never kid about stuff like this. You already know what I think—you should be in art school and not wasting time studying semiotics or whatever at Brown. You have a true gift, and I think you could really be at the forefront of a new generation of artists. Think about it.”

“Thank you. I will.” Lucie nodded politely, not wanting to challenge him. She didn’t want to prolong this little vernissage any longer; she just wanted to get back to her room.

As Lucie strode across the lobby toward the elevator, Auden stared after her, even more intrigued than before. Seeing these paintings was like witnessing the work of a girl possessed. The girl who had just been seated before him with the perfect posture and her hair in a tight ponytail, so composed as she swiped through her artwork, did not for one second resemble someone who would be able to create those canvases. Where was the real Lucie Churchill hiding? Or better yet, why?

Auden could not have known that even before Lucie had boarded the Murphys’ super yacht, cruised back to Capri while being held hostage to another design tour by Mordecai, crammed into a taxi with the Ortiz sisters, waded through the wall of tourists on the walk back to the hotel, and placidly sat there presenting her artwork, pretending to listen politely, her mind was somewhere else entirely, and it was playing this over and over on a constant loop:

Did he kiss me or did I kiss him? Fuck, I think I kissed him first. Why did I kiss him? Why oh why oh why? Did it really happen? How much did Charlotte see? Why did she show up at that very moment? Where is George now? What is he thinking right now? What must he think of me now? Did he kiss me or did I kiss him?

Returning to her room at long last, Lucie closed the door behind her, fastened the security latch, and transformed into the girl whom Auden Beebe had sensed in the paintings. As she lay on her bed with her phone, she became a girl possessed as she searched desperately for anything and everything she could find about George Zao online.

First up was his Instagram account, which was easy to locate because he had liked Isabel’s first post from Capri. His account name was @zaoist, and Lucie immediately recognized the image that he used as his avatar—the rocks arranged in a spiral pattern was unmistakably a photo of Spiral Jetty, a sculpture created in the middle of a lake in Utah by the artist Robert Smithson. She had read all about it in her art history class last semester.

Curiously, there wasn’t a single photo of himself or any other person on George’s account. Did he not have a single friend? Actually, that wasn’t true. He had 4,349 followers! That was 3,000+ more than her. How in the world did he have so many followers when he was following only 332 people? He obviously wasn’t very active on the app, since there were only eighty-eight posts. Scrolling through his feed, she saw that it consisted of perfectly composed architecture, food, and travel images. If all he did was post photos from other travel and design sites, why was he getting so many likes? Lucie started to scrutinize the images in his posts more closely:

A chapel in Ronchamp. Okay, it’s that chapel designed by that famous architect. fn2

Char siew bao in a bamboo steamer. Yum.

Dominique de Menil’s house in Houston. Is that an Yves Klein on the wall?

The swimming pool at the Amangiri resort. Take me there.

A vintage Airstream trailer in Marfa. Cool.

Zion National Park at sunset. Wow.

Spam sushi. Yuck.

A copy of Learning from Las Vegas on an empty desk. What’s this book? Lucie quickly googled it: “ Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of ‘common’ people and less immodest in their erections of ‘heroic,’ self-aggrandizing monuments.” George sure is an architecture geek.

A wooden shack in the middle of the desert. Whatever.

A bacon cheeseburger between two doughnuts. Yuck. Why are guys into gross foods?

A humpback whale breaching in Sydney Harbor. So cool.

The Faraglioni rocks. Been there.

A blue lizard. How cute. Is it that species that’s only found on that rock?

The stairs at Casa Malaparte. Of course.

The silhouette of a figure standing on the roof at Casa Malaparte.

Lucie gasped as she realized it was a photo of her. She zoomed in on the image. Yes, it was definitely her, taken yesterday right before she had her meltdown on the roof. For a moment, she got annoyed. Why did he take her picture like that without her consent? What a creep! Was he one of those guys who went around taking pictures of girls when he knew they weren’t looking? As Lucie stared at the picture longer, she began to calm down. It was a beautiful shot. And with the sun against her, turning her figure into a black silhouette against the golden light, it wasn’t as if she was recognizable. It could have been anyone. She made a quick screen grab of the photo, and it dawned on her that all the perfectly composed pictures on his Instagram weren’t reposts from other accounts. Every single picture had been taken by him. George had a good eye, and she found herself grudgingly impressed.

Shifting from Instagram to Twitter, Lucie found twenty-three George Zaos, but after some detective work she realized that none of those accounts was his. It made sense that George wouldn’t be on Twitter. Since he hardly spoke, why would he ever want to tweet? She went next to Facebook, where she located him quickly since they were both “friends” with Isabel and Dolfi. However, his account was set to the highest privacy settings, so it didn’t give much away. She couldn’t see how many friends he had; she couldn’t see any of his posts. What she could see was his Facebook profile pic and his banner photo, which was a black-and-white image of a gorilla sitting on a beach. Standing nonchalantly off to the side was a man with a surfboard, looking out at the waves and completely ignoring the gorilla. Was it meant to be funny?

George’s profile picture was another black-and-white shot of him grinning into the camera. It looked like one of those pictures purposefully chosen to be casual, as if he just put up whatever random photo was available. It wasn’t perfectly composed and he didn’t look too posed or too cute in it. In fact, he looked a few years younger—his face rounder and less chiseled—and he was wearing a nondescript black T-shirt and a cap. She tried to make out the logo on the cap but it was blocked by a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers tucked over the brim.

Frustrated that she wasn’t finding much on his social media, Lucie tried googling his name. There were hundreds of other George Zaos, of course, but only one decent hit—a headline from the Daily Telegraph in Australia in 2010:

MOSMAN SURFER GEORGE ZAO EARNS SPOT AT WORLD JUNIOR TITLES IN TAIWAN

To the right of the headline was a small picture of George at around fifteen in a wetsuit, standing against a backdrop with Surfing NSW and Quiksilver logos. His hair was down to his chin, and there appeared to be blond streaks in the front. Lucie clicked on the story excitedly but came up against a paywall that only revealed a short excerpt: