Hold On Tight (22 page)

“Lara …,” he whispered.

The twin bed they'd slept on was so small that they were forced to spoon—not that Arno minded—and he could feel her lank, warm body next to his. For a moment, Arno glimpsed the future: small, spare rooms, lofty ideas, and Lara next to him through it all. His vision practically dripped with meaning.

“Lara …,” he whispered again.

She jerked around in the bed, and then pulled up her eye mask to look up at him. If he hadn't known better, he'd have thought the look on her face was surprise.

“Oh, hello,” she said flatly, and then rolled out of the bed, taking the sheet with her. She stumbled across the floor, took a cigarette from the top of the dresser and lit
it. She moved to the twin bed opposite the one they'd slept in and sat down in her sheet toga. She stared at Arno while twisting her hair in a knot on the top of her head.

Lara didn't look as lovely as she had last night—her skin was blotchy, and the scowl wasn't very flattering either—but Arno reminded himself that this was a meaningful relationship. In a meaningful relationship, looking good wasn't
always
important; you were bound to see your lover when she was not at her most gorgeous and you just got over it.

“Arno,” she said, “what are you still doing here?”

“What?” Arno felt like he was in some sub-reality. “We slept together last night.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lara said. “But that doesn't really answer my question, does it? What are you still
doing
here?”

“Well, I mean, I slept here, and now I'm awake so …”

“Let me rephrase the question. Why haven't you
left
yet?”

Arno wished his mind was moving quicker, because he was having trouble comprehending Lara's words and tone. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then started over. “Well, in a meaningful relationship you wake up beside the other person, right?”

“What meaningful relationship?” Lara asked, taking a drag of her cigarette.

“Um …
ours?”
he replied. When Lara raised an irritated eyebrow, he continued, “I did it—I was in love with someone else. First love, naivete, I've done all that. Now I'm ready to be in love with
you
and have a meaningful relationship and everything that goes along with it.”

Lara made a scoffing noise. “Listen, I got over relationships way back in the fall of my freshman year.”

“What?” Arno knew his bottom lip was hanging down like a baby's, but he couldn't help it.

Lara sighed impatiently and took a last drag of her cigarette before flicking it in the direction of the window. “Arno, I was just using you for sex, you get it? Now would you clear out of here? I have a lot of studying to do today.”

Arno's heart was somewhere down near his feet now. He didn't understand how a girl who was so complex and mysterious could behave the same way superficial New York party girls did. How could studying be more important than this relationship that he'd been working toward all week? But he did understand that he had to leave the room. Now. To be followed shortly, he hoped, by the dorm itself. And then Sarah Lawrence altogether.

“I am so glad you're here,” Lourdes Soto, the chair of the Sarah Lawrence Art Department said, as she ushered Mickey into the small room adjacent to the lecture hall. She appeared to be out of breath. “The crowd is getting restless.”

“This is my friend David,” Mickey said. He looked rumpled and smelled slightly of beer and he knew it, but he had at least succumbed to David's pleas and put on a pair of pin-striped pants and a white T-shirt instead of the white terry-cloth robe he had been sporting for the previous twenty-four hours. “He's also my assistant. Can you arrange to have a chair for him onstage?”

“Yes, of course,” Professor Soto said. She had dark auburn hair collected in a bun at the nape of her neck, and, in her neat black suit, she looked much more grown up and academiclike than Mickey remembered her being.

She stepped aside and spoke to a graduate student who had just come in. The graduate student then
disappeared, apparently to fetch the chair. “I have some bad news,” Professor Soto said as she returned to them. “They had to tow the limo. But don't worry. We'll have the vehicle back by the end of the lecture so that you can have it for your personal use for the rest of the weekend.”

Mickey glared at Professor Soto and then said, “That's fine, Lourdes. Can you have these put in a slide carousel for me? They're in order.” He could feel David shifting nervously behind him, and he nudged him to toughen up.

“Of course,” Professor Soto said. Another grad student appeared with a slide carousel, and when he had finished arranging the slides Professor Soto told him to set them up in the lecture hall. “Shall we?” she asked, extending her arm to Mickey.

Mickey let her lead him onto the stage. A hush fell over the audience as David and then Mickey took their seats. Mickey could tell by the way girls were craning their necks that they were trying to figure out if it was the David from the pictures, and he leaned over to tell David so in a loud whisper. Then they both listened as Professor Soto praised Mickey as well as the college for being able to woo the most provocative minds of the coming generation for their Saturday-afternoon lecture series.

After her remarks there was light applause, and then Mickey approached the lectern.

“Well,” Mickey began with a chortle, “you already know who I am. Professor Soto was just very kind in her opening remarks, and, of course, unless you've been living under a rock for the last week”—the audience roared—“you've heard of my work exploring nudity in public places.”

Mickey grinned at his fans, who had packed into every corner of the room like little toy soldiers. They were all eager to see what he had to show them. He also noted with satisfaction that a student wearing a red-and-white vest that said fire marshall on it was walking up and down the aisles anxiously clearing a path in case of an emergency.

“But tonight I have something new for you. Think of it as a journey. Lights please.” The lights dimmed, and Mickey clicked to his first slide. It projected a skyline of New York, with setbacks and rooftop gardens and water towers lit from behind by the early morning light. It was the view from the roof of the Pardo townhouse.

Mickey seemed to remember a lot of effortless and hilarious banter the last time he'd lectured, but he was really tired at the moment, so he decided to go for a more hands-off approach. Maybe it would be mysterious? He clicked through the pictures of architectural
façades and cityscapes, which he had carefully arranged so they moved downward. Into the depths of the city— that's what he'd told himself. Occasionally, he punctuated a picture with a few words: “urban decay,” or “hazy morning,” or “bodega.”

The audience was so quiet he wondered if he'd put a spell on them. Then he heard someone call, “Where's the skin?” He looked over to Professor Soto, who was looking apprehensively at the audience, and then he went on.

Mickey clicked forward to the first picture that included himself. “Flesh,” he said.

On the screen behind him, an image of a cobblestone street appeared. There was a wall of plastered advertisements on one side of the picture, and on the other was Mickey Pardo's naked behind as he dashed out of the picture frame. The audience made a noise that wasn't exactly awe.

Mickey flicked through several similar pictures.

“What interests me here,” he said, “is the contrast between bodies and buildings, bone and steel.”

There was a loud cough from the audience. Mickey was acutely aware of someone getting up and leaving. He flicked to a picture of himself lying on top of his terry-cloth robe under the Washington Square arch. “There is a beauty in what's fallen,” he said.

“Oh, come
on
,” someone from the audience said.

Mickey ignored this, and clicked to a picture of him standing proudly on top of a trash can. “But the city always rises above.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Mickey Pardo?” cried a girl sitting close to the back. There was snickering throughout the lecture hall.

“This is boring!” someone else called.

Mickey clicked his slide emphatically. “Is there a problem?” he said into the microphone. Feedback screeched in his ears. There was some loud grumbling, and for a minute it appeared that nobody was going to be brave enough to say anything.

“We want ass!” a voice near the front of the lecture hall cried. More grumbling followed, mixed with applause.

Mickey turned toward David with a desperate look.

“Keep going,” David whispered. “It's just a rocky start.”

Mickey looked back at the audience. “The city, like the body, never shuts down …,” he said into the microphone.

“Is this cheap philosophizing what my parents paid forty thousand dollars for?” Someone else called. “Cuz it's definitely not worth that much!”

“Ass, ass, ass!” A group of girls in the mezzanine were chanting.

“Yeah, we came for ass, not a full frontal shot of your serious little willy!” Mickey wasn't even sure where the voices were coming from anymore. He was getting damp under the armpits, and he could smell beer on himself, which only reminded him that he would rather be drinking a nice cold beer right now instead of lecturing to people who didn't get him.

A guy in a worn T-shirt and black jeans stood up, somewhere in the middle of the lecture hall. “This is bull,” he started in a high whiny tone. “This is a total vanity photo project that we've all been duped into wasting our Saturday afternoon on. Not to mention that it is total crap that the college can spend thousands of dollars to get this guy to come talk, but they can't even provide studios for all the senior art majors.”

Suddenly, everyone was yelling. Mickey rolled his eyes and turned to Professor Soto for assistance. He looked just in time to see her dashing into the adjacent room. David jumped up to bring her back, but he found the door locked, and he turned to give Mickey a frightened shrug.

“I mean really,” a girl in the front row called up to him, “were you ever cool, or was it all just hype?”

“It's not hype,” Mickey said desperately. “I'm the real deal!”

This seemed to make it worse. Everyone was yelling
now, and the whole back row was chanting, “Go home! Go home! Go home!”

Mickey turned his bloodshot eyes on David.

“I don't understand,” Mickey said.

“Me neither,” David said. His eyes were also bloodshot, but the sight of him was comforting to Mickey nonetheless.

“We gotta get out of here,” Mickey said.

“Let's go.”

“No—not yet. I can't leave it like this. There might be a riot. You go—round up the guys. I'll pacify ‘em, and meet you outside in fifteen.”

David gave Mickey a long, hard look. “Are you sure?”

“Just go!”

“Does a girl have to be
naked
to get
lectured
about on
campus?”
Jill yelled at some of the stragglers who were still cramming their way into Sarah Lawrence's main lecture hall. They looked at her, confused, and we all jostled our signs in their direction and clapped rhythmically five times. There were about seven girls and me, standing on the walk to the lecture hall, on a bright, cloudless, and very collegiate day.

“Celebrate—don't exploit—women artists! Woohoo!”

Two boys and a girl walking to the lecture hall still looked confused. They gave us thumbs-ups and disappeared inside. We had already watched what seemed like every person on campus go into the lecture hall, and now we were just sitting outside chanting to ourselves, mostly.

“This is way more fun than I thought it would be,” I said. And I didn't even have to try to say it. I
really meant it. Being outside and making a big fuss about all the bad out there felt really frickin' good.

“I know, isn't it neat?” Ava laughed. She was wearing the tiger mask I'd made for her, and I was still wearing my penguin one. “Jill and I come from this really political family. Some families go to Hawaii together—
we
had to march on Washington.” She rolled her eyes like it was ridiculous, but I could tell that this was how she thought of herself.

“Do you think we had any effect?” I asked Jill.

“Absolutely. I mean, we go to school with a bunch of sheep anyway. But trust me. The subversive message is lodged in their brains now.” She cackled faux-maniacally.

Another group of stragglers went by, and we jostled our signs again and made a variety of animal noises. Because I had no idea what kind of noises penguins made, I went for the rooster noise. This group was wearing those oversized T-shirts with naked people on the front, which struck me as really sophomoric. They peered at us, trying to figure out who was behind the masks.

“Equal pay for equal work!” the girls chanted.

“Save the penguins!” I added.

“Hell no, we won't go!” one of the girls in our group yelled. The kids walked on. We all clapped for each other.

I was starting to realize that one of the coolest parts of caring about something and making it known is how it catches everyone off guard. They all just stare at you with these funny expressions on their faces. It's sort of like riding around town in a Mini Cooper.

It was right around the time that we start chanting about all the inequities of the world, and not just women in the arts, that I noticed a strange trend. There were still some people going into the lecture hall, but now people were starting to leave it, too. The people who were leaving didn't bother looking at us. They look pissed and all riled up.

“Maybe our message has taken effect already?” the thin-lipped girl said. (I had since discovered that her name was Sylvia and that she was the president of the campus chapter of the National Organization for Women, which explained the big, purple NOW shirt that was currently dwarfing her small frame.)