Listings under Events. Group shows throughout the winter, into spring—she’s busy even if she’s trying to stay relatively anonymous. I check the dates—in a few weeks, for the “First Friday” Mission art crawl, a show opens called Paper Covers Rock, all works on paper at a space called the Glass Dome.
I talk with Gavril late into the night. He asks when I’ll be through with this and I tell him I don’t know. “Soon, maybe—”
“I would love to see San Francisco,” he says. “I’ve always thought I would like to see the Redwoods. Drive a car through a hollowed-out tree trunk—”
5, 3—
An art crawl tonight, openings at thirty-three venues throughout the Mission, places like Artists’ Television Access, Project Artaud, the kind of grant-funded spaces Theresa and I used to visit during crawls back in Pittsburgh, the Xchange, Intersection for the Arts, the Mission Cultural Center and the Glass Dome—free downloads with walking tours, exhibition highlights, artist bios, the most hyped show a display of Day of the Dead masks made by the Latino Art League. I eat an omelet for dinner at a café called Kahlo and buy fresh-cut fries doused with vinegar and ketchup from a street vendor on Dolores. Mexican folk buskers and exhibitions of salsa dancing in the closed-off streets—gallery assistants cut among the crowds passing out handbills for after parties. The streets and sidewalks are already carpeted with their handbills and postcards, most augged with Day of the Dead death’s-heads, ornately painted skulls with crimson eyes and flashing grins that float illusory in 3-D and break apart as I step through them. Hesitant among the crowds, trying to figure my move—a gnawing doubt in my guts that I shouldn’t meet Albion at all, that I should let her be, let this all drop and run, but knowing Timothy and Waverly won’t ever let me disappear, knowing that Hannah Massey will disappear forever. A drag queen procession’s just getting started, a Tina Turner mash-up Sousa march—the pageant queen’s dressed like Meecham, a Stars and Stripes ball gown and a pig skull mask.
The Glass Dome’s street-front windows are lettered Paper Covers Rock: New San Francisco Works on Paper. Electro house emanates from inside, vintage Deadmau5, a riot vibe fueling the dance party erupting in the streets. I shoulder my way through the crowd at the door—an acute claustrophobia hits me, like instead of a narrow space crowded for an exhibition I’m in a cave packed tight with bodies. The Glass Dome’s a tapered space, like a hallway without doors—it reminds me of Pittsburgh galleries: reclaimed buildings left raw with exposed tubing and knotty braids of wiring. Pittsburgh was ringed with dead mill towns, ghost towns almost, ripe for art collectives and nonprofits to rent on the cheap, whole neighborhoods that would have died out and disappeared except for artists that wanted to rent a sense of authenticity and grit.
I grab a can of beer from a leaking kiddie pool filled with ice. I stay to the sides of the crowd. I make my way to Albion’s fascicle—this one unstitched, the six pages displayed in a line, hung with pins. A portrait of the blonde—Peyton—and despite the suffocating crowd, the inadvertent knocks and nudges in the congested room, the changes in music and the greater pitch of conversation as the party deepens, everything might as well be silent as I stare at the artwork and realize that what I’m looking at isn’t the fetishized limbs of a young woman, but an entire portrait broken into six planes as if I’m looking at the reflection of a nude in six shattered mirrors, or reading her body in six chapters. Only two of the six show her face, her head arched rearward in a limp frenzy, her expression like The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and I realize that her entire body, obscured though it is in Albion’s cubist disjunctions, would echo The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa without the impish angel, without the touch of God. An attendant places orange sticker dots next to each painting, denoting that they’d sold. Two other artists show their work—cuttings along one wall of urban scenes, the other a set of phrases, Dispositif, or Panopticon, painted in black Times New Roman on white paper, simple things.
She’s here.
I miss when she comes in, but notice the tone of the room shifts, when everyone present despite their fashion and cultured posing seems suddenly dim and wan, suddenly insignificant. I see her over the heads of others, her hair dyed raven black. Her friends flock to her, and watching her hug women she knows is like watching the bride embrace her bridesmaids. She wears a white dress tied at the waist with a black ribbon, but her shoulders, her elegant neck, the length of her arms are almost paler than the white lace. Her skirt has two large pockets, each pocket filled with a bouquet of daisies. I shrink against the wall—irrelevant now that she’s here, all my troubles and all my desires suddenly the concern of a minor character that’s barely made the page. The first thing Albion does is find the other two artists in the exhibit with her, two men who look like schoolchildren meeting a woman for the first time when she gives each a bouquet and congratulates them on their work. Taller than the others here, she leans over to hear them talk, her body swanlike. She laughs easily.
Admirers cluster around her most of the evening. She drifts from one group to the next, people congratulating her on her work. I overhear them asking her to explain the woman, but she talks about technique and style instead, avoiding mention of who this woman is. I hear people calling her “Darwyn,” a few, who must be closer friends, call her “Dar.” A few hours pass, the crowd’s thinned out but Albion remains. I wait until she’s alone, a break in her conversations, when she’s in line for the drink table.
I wait in line behind her. She wears her hair up, like a wave of silk. She’s near enough I could touch her—feel her here in the world with me, no longer an illusion. The shape of her neck flows into her shoulders in a perfect line, like she’s been carved from marble. Is she real? Am I hallucinating now? A scatter of freckles flecks her shoulders, near her collar. Wisps of hair on her neck grow a chestnut red. I don’t know what to say, so I say, “Raven and Honeybear—”
She flinches from me like I’ve struck her.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, as if I might be able to take it back, approach her in some other way—but it’s too late. I feel myself blushing and shiver with sweat. There’s so much I want to say to her, but all I can say is, “I’m sorry—”
She recovers, like someone falsifying dignity after a public humiliation.
“That was a long time ago,” she says, her voice touched by an accent—West Virginia, maybe, or rural Pennsylvania.
“Albion?” I say.