Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“He still has to eat, though,” Meg said.

“No, Taffy French can hire people to eat for him,” Paulo said.

“Pam worked for Taffy French one summer,” Meg said.

“She spent most of it choosing and presenting fabric swatches and wood grains for Taffy French’s baby daughter’s new high chair,” Jen said.

“Wait, was Taige Hammerback the same guy who takes Polaroids of landscapes, and then he glues them into little hand-stitched books, and the books are kind of dirty and dusty, like they’ve been out cattle ranching?” Meg asked.

“But then he did a thing where he attached Polaroids of Western landscapes to actual cattle, who wandered around in the sun until the Polaroids were totally sunbleached and blank, and then he exhibited the destroyed Polaroids,” Jen said.

“It doesn’t even matter what Taige Hammerback makes,” Paulo said, “because it’s all personality-driven. You just come up with a persona and you’re more than halfway there.”

“So, okay, easy, you just need a persona, Paulo,” Jen said.

“Hairy drunkard,” Paulo said.

“Hirsute oenophile,” Meg said.

“I’m afraid that authorization code has expired, ma’am,” a woman’s voice behind Jen said.

Over Paulo’s shoulder, Jen spotted Jim, who had wandered away to a table labeled “Instructions for Breakage” that was scattered with peanuts, Christmas crackers, and several still-intact piggy banks. He was methodically snapping every bubble on a sheet of bubble wrap.

“Let’s go see Pam,” Jen said.

Pam was resplendent in a loose topknot and a ruffled, emerald-colored shift, the shortest dress she owned. (“I am going to wear the shortest dress I own,” she had told Jen on the phone the night before, “but I can’t remember what it is.”) The dress — tight and structured when Pam first purchased it, now hanging fashionably loose from her frame — indicated that she’d lost a great deal of weight during her recovery, and what little she’d put back on was lean muscle from physical therapy. Her naturally round face was thinner but not gaunt; now she had more prominent cheekbones and a more severe jawline and, as Leora would say when hawking LeoraLash™, “eyes that pop.” A wild, ghastly thought careened into Jen’s head: that the accident had been — in some cosmic sense beyond Pam’s control but inextricably knit into her destiny — intentional, karmic, a net positive. It had given Pam a compelling backstory and a wellspring of creative fodder, and somewhat improbably, it had raised her conventional-beauty quotient. Even the scars on Pam’s model-skinny leg, flat and faded, looked art-directed, geometric. The lines of her legs and the lines on her legs signaled pathos and sex and dangerous youth and discipline and a hard-earned beauty. A glamour of tragedy and luck. Liabilities had shape-shifted into assets. Into a persona.

Jen blinked hard and shook her head almost imperceptibly, as if a drop of water bobbled in her ear canal. Sometimes she felt on the verge of apologizing to others for the faux pas her brain regularly committed.

“You’ve always been a genius of reappropriation, Pam,” Sue Kittredge, one of Pam and Jen’s college professors, was saying. “But this time what you are reappropriating is you. It’s such an act of empowerment. And it’s so generous of you to share it with us.”

Pam shrugged and smiled. “What can I say — I ran out of other material.”

“I think it’s a breakthrough,” Sue Kittredge said. “So bold. So brave.”

“Hi, girls!” Pam exclaimed to Meg and Jen, putting one arm around each of them in a three-way hug. “Thanks for coming, and Jen, thanks for making sure there was some actual art at the art show.”

“And you, Jen.” Sue Kittredge turned to embrace her former student. “These portraits brought back such wonderful memories for me.”

“Aw, thanks. It was fun. I don’t think you’ve met my husband, Jim — that’s him over there, the guy who just dropped the peanuts, and he seems to be trying to start a conversation with one of the lip-synchers.”

“I can certainly understand your frustration, ma’am,” a woman’s voice said behind them.

“Okay, so Mrs. Flossie Durbin is hovering near the exit,” Meg was saying urgently to Pam, “and she never stays at these things longer than twenty minutes. Let’s pounce on her now — I can introduce you.”

“I don’t know,” Pam said. “Shouldn’t Mrs. Flossie Durbin be free to come and go as she pleases?”

An exponentially more productive blogger than Flossie Durbin, the well-known economics writer Hatch Warren, once crunched the numbers and concluded that a Flossie Durbin blog post — which tended to forgo formal or analytical rigor in favor of declarative brevity — raised the valuation of an artist’s work by a median of 18 percent. One past recipient of a Flossie Durbin blog post was Logan Benson, a first-year Yale MFA student who appropriated the tags of anonymous street artists in tapestries in the mille-fleur style. (“Fresh and vibrant,” Mrs. Durbin wrote. “The colors are animated but never cloying, the darker tones are haunting but never morbid. A clean balance of raw energy and highly wrought technique. Recommend.”) Another time, the recipient was Alex Katz. (“We risk forgetting the exciting audacity of the lonely figurative painter forging his own path in an Abstract Expressionist moment. Who else could have found so much roundness in flatness? Recommend.”) Years ago, Mrs. Durbin’s personal assistant had sent Pam an email inquiry about staging a Wake, but despite Pam’s enthusiastic replies — three emails, three voicemails, and a three-page handwritten letter — the assistant had never followed up.

This was not unusual, and was characteristic of Mrs. Durbin as a study in contrasts: Her enthusiasms seemed as fickle as her influence was glacial, axiomatic, permanent; her moneyed remoteness could pair comfortably with her penchant for turning up at minimally publicized, low-budget gallery openings in inconvenient areas of town; her rarefied provenance and withholding, near-mute public persona could somehow coexist with her enthusiasm for second-generation blogging software. Even the coolest of the cool kids among the overlapping social circles of whatever constituted the city’s “underground” art scene — Pam and Paulo among them — regarded Mrs. Flossie Durbin with an amused fondness, a kind of benign condescension that would have vaporized on contact should her finger have ever fallen upon their shoulders in a tap of election.

“Eighteen percent, Pam!” Meg was saying.

“Eighteen percent of zero is still zero,” Pam said, taking Meg’s arm. “But I’m happy to meet a nice lady.”

“I’m amazed that Mrs. Flossie Durbin is even in town in the summer,” Jen said to Sue Kittredge as Pam and Meg nudged their way through the crowd toward the exit. She raised her glass, tilting it so that the wine tipped against her lips and back again.

“You know, you haven’t changed a bit, Jen,” Sue Kittredge said. “What else are you up to these days? Where can we see more of your work?”

“This is pretty much it! I was just a hired goon for Pam on this,” Jen said.

“That can’t be true.”

“Well, you know how it is — you have the job that pays the bills, you think you’ll have time to make things on the side, but over the years, it just kind of slips away,” Jen said. “Although, listening to myself, I’m probably just making excuses.”

“Do you and your husband have kids yet?”

Jen smiled big and wide. “Nope!” she said.

“In that case, you really do have no excuse. Where do you work?”

“Well, until recently I worked at the, uh, the Federloss Foundation?”