Chapter 16: A Meeting of Minds

There were a lot of things about Max that were worth liking. He was smart, funny, played guitar, didn’t watch sports, and was so mellow and uncomplicated that I could convince myself that he was interesting.

He was also a fantastic sculptor and major art geek and a huge fan of Bette Porter and her quickly growing reputation.

At the time, I could not yet decide whether I wanted to file that last point under the good column or the bad column.

That being said, Max had a strange and somewhat annoying habit of asking me whether I wanted to accompany him to art museums and galleries something like two times a week. At one point, of course, one of these galleries would be Bette’s, but as it was a Saturday afternoon, I didn’t think our chances of running into Bette Porter herself were very high. This, I think, has a lot to do with me having a knack for ugly irony.

Max’s favorite was the Laura Ford exhibition-I don’t know, this might have something to do with some sort of strange, inbred kinship between sculptors-and what he did this one day was spend an entire hour in the east-wing of the gallery. And he kept just circling this one sculpture, like, over and over, and it was making me ***** dizzy, so I told him I was gonna wander around and could he do me a favor and stop being so creepy?

So I went back into the main gallery and looked around for awhile, but eventually I just had to take a seat because this was the third time I’d seen this particular collection, and I’m not even much of an art enthusiast. Actually, I was watching this little girl torment her mother within an inch of her life. It was like this:

Mother of Evil Little Girl (in a soft, soothing tone): Can you give me that lollipop?

Evil Little Girl (shrilly, high-pitched): No!

Mother of Evil Little Girl (still remarkably calm): Now, that’s not your lollipop, is it? It belongs to that boy over there. Can you hand it to Mommy?

Evil Little Girl (shrieking): No!