Now, Char hustles over to Mateo, wiping his hands on a rag. “You ready to do this?” he bellows, a big grin on his face.
Suddenly, Mateo crests with excitement and happiness. The space is so strange, so different, so — so strangely filled with light! “I’m so fucking ready,” he says, and the two of them bear-hug. “Let’s paint the shit out of the place.”
Everyone’s turned to watch the two of them embrace, including Ruby Levin.
“Woo-hoo!” she finally calls. “We’re doing it! Guys, we’re doing it! We’re putting art in the UnderPark!”
This leads to a big round of applause and more woo-hoos. Soon, Mateo, Char, Ruby, and the assistants are standing in front of the awaiting corner and tracing their fingers over images on their tablets. Two assistants are warming paints on hot plates hooked up to a generator — these special paints they’re using have to be heated to a certain warm-but-not-hot temperature in order to molecularly bond with the primer and with the high-tech reflective surface of the park’s inner walls.
Char asks Mateo, “Do you want to start tracing in B7?” He means the B7 section of the grid they’ve superimposed on their tablet images of the wall.
“The primer’s dry?” Mateo asks.
“We tested it this morning. They heat-sealed it last night.”
“Okay, let’s do it then,” Mateo says. “Let’s set up the scaffolding.”
And it begins. Once the scaffold is set up, he installs himself up there with a stack of stencils and a charcoal pencil. He sketches in the very first stencil of an abstract leaf pattern he and Char have designed.
“Nicely done,” Char calls, climbing up the adjoining scaffold. “You gonna work toward me in a spiral pattern?”
“You like spirals, not me,” he says. “I’m gonna slice down into C6 in a sort of wiggly diagonal.”
“Ah, a wiggly diagonal!” Char echoes, teasing him. “Very high-concept, Mendes.”
He blows Char a kiss off the top of his middle finger, turns back to his work. He’s very happy, lost in the patterns, just where he likes to be.
Sixty minutes later, he climbs down to stretch, pee, have a smoke, grab a bagel from the craft table Creative Production Fund’s set up. Talking to Char and Ruby and some of the interns, he notices a pretty late-twentysomething brunette standing off to the side, smiling his way. He nods in her direction, and once he’s broken off from Char and Ruby to spread some cream cheese on a bagel, the brunette walks up to him.
“Mateo?” she asks.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Hi. I’m Tanzina Parcero. I’m an arts writer for the Times’s art vertical.”
“Ah!” Mateo says. “Ah, okay. Well, hi there, Tanzina.” He offers a hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“This is super-exciting, isn’t it?” she says, pointing to the wall and the scaffolding.
“Uh—” he says. “Well, yeah, it is!” He’s a bit mesmerized by her glossy brown hair and massive brown eyes. She’s definitely in that same category of pretty light-brown girl with glossy hair that Dani falls in for him. “We just started this morning and I’m super-excited.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says. “People are very intrigued about this. Can I talk to you for a little write-up about the project?” She’s already pulling her tablet out of her bag.
“Uhh—” he says uncertainly.
Ruby’s hustling over. “Hi there, Tanzina!” she says brightly.
“Hi, Ruby!” The two share a little hug. Tanzina asks, “You don’t mind if I get a little something from Mateo for a post for the vertical, do you?”
“Umm,” Ruby says slowly. “It’s really up to Mateo and Char if they want to talk about the project at this point. They literally just started this morning.”
“Char!” Mateo calls. Char turns away from the scaffolding, hustles over. “Do we want to talk to Tanzina? She’s a writer for the Times art vertical.”
Mateo catches a little sparkle in Char’s eyes; he figures Char’s as attracted to Tanzina as he is. Char shrugs. “Sure,” he says. “Thanks for coming down.”
“Okay, great,” Tanzina says, tapping the “record” button on her tablet screen. “Okay, wow, guys. So, here we are, day one. So what is the process going to be?”
“Uhh—” Mateo and Char say, nearly in unison. Then Char picks up: “Well, I think the general idea is, you see, there will be a, um, a copse of baby silver maple trees in that corner. So, um, our idea is we are going to do a kind of wall of, like, well, I like to call them space leaves—”
Tanzina laughs, delighted. “Space leaves?”
“Yeah,” Char says, laughing. “Like, leaves that if you found trees on Mars or Neptune or something, they’d have these kind of leaves. Like, you’d recognize them as leaves, but there’d be something weird, like, mutant, about them. A little creepy, maybe, even.”
“Char’s not totally from the planet Earth,” Mateo jokes. “He’s part Vulcan.”
It goes on like this for a while, Mateo and Char enjoying this banter and describing the process. Then, without changing a note, Tanzina asks, “Okay, cool. And, Mateo, are you going to the opening of your father’s show at Blum-36 a week from Friday?”
Mateo, Char, and Ruby all do a start. “Huh?” Mateo finally says. “My father?” He starts getting a crummy betrayed feeling that all Tanzina’s questions about their project were just a ramp-up to this.
“Well, yes, your father Jared Traum’s new show at Blum-36 a week from Friday,” Tanzina repeats. Mateo can see a certain something harden around those big brown eyes of hers, as much as she’s still smiling. He supposes it was foolish of him, or naive or wishful thinking, to imagine that nobody was going to bring up this connection at some point.
“I mean,” Mateo says, “he’s not really my father.”
“He’s your adoptive father, right?” Tanzina asks.
“I think Mateo and Char want to keep the focus on this project,” Ruby says firmly. “I mean, they just started this morning.”
“We got a shitload of work to do,” adds Char. It’s clear they’re both backing up behind Mateo now, protective.
“No, no,” Mateo says, flustered. “I mean, it’s okay.” He turns to Tanzina, whose eyes are intense, gleeful that he’s engaging her on this, as she holds her tablet toward him. “I mean, yes, he’s my adoptive father. But we’re not really in touch. I’ve been living in L.A. the past ten years or so and — I mean, I was a wild child growing up here. Ten, fifteen years ago, I mean, the Lower East Side isn’t what it is today, I mean, it was rougher. Like, not as rough as, like, the eighties or whatever, but, uh, way more drugs, and. .”
He loses his train of thought, then regains it. “I mean, I think they needed a break from me. My adoptive parents. I really put them through it.”
“Mmm,” says Tanzina, as though she’s gravely absorbing his words. “Well, you think you’ll see your adoptive mom while you’re here? She still lives here, right?” She’s holding that damn tablet toward him.
“This feels like it’s getting far too personal,” Ruby says. This time Mateo can hear the indignation breaking through her usually flawlessly bright and diplomatic demeanor. “I thought you said you were just writing a post about the project getting under way.”
Tanzina widens her eyes, all innocent. “This is part of the story!” she says. “A New York art family.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Mateo says, before he can stop himself. “That is so not the story.”
Tanzina’s lovely eyes dance with drunken delight at his small explosion. Oh God, now he’s fucked. “I mean,” Mateo says, “the story is — that we have a shitload of work to do. So I’m gonna eat my bagel and get back to work. Take care.”