The Fine Art of Truth or Dare

by Melissa Jensen

  “You sound like Frankie.”

  “Of course I do. So . . . ?”

  “A hypertrophic, hyperpigmented scar is just ugly. An irrevocably broken heart is beautiful and poetic.”

  “The breaking is not nice,” Edward said, a little sharply. “I don’t recommend it.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  He grunted. “What is it you want, Ella?”

  “What you had,” I answered softly, “with Diana. That once-in-a-lifetime connection that makes everything good.”

  “Fine. But you do realize that in order to be loved like that, you have to let the lucky gentleman see you. I mean truly see you, scars and all.”

  “Yes, Edward, I am fully aware of that.”

  “But you don’t want anyone to really look at you.”

  He had me there. “Well, no.”

  “Good luck with that, then,” he said, then yawned and closed his eyes, telling me the conversation was over.

  12

  THE REVIEW

  From The Collected Correspondence of Edward Willing, edited, enhanced, and with illustrations by Lucretia Willing Adamson. Henry Altemus Company, Philadelphia, 1923:

  Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

  October 23

  The Plaza Hotel

  My Darling,

  Well, it is settled. The Metropolitan Museum shall buy Cleopatra. You may send your profuse thanks to Mr. F. W. Rhinelander for his invaluable assistance in removing it from your sphere to his.

  I lunched with him today and was introduced to his granddaughter, Edith Wharton, who is visiting. She is not especially pretty, but is quite clever and excessively well read. She prefers the design of gardens, I believe, to that of art, and dabbles in both poetry and prose. She is not entirely well; she and her husband will be returning to Europe soon, she hopes, so she may take some cures in France. She recommended several spas there from which you might benefit.

  Shall we go to Paris next spring? You will certainly be well by then. I agree that Dr. Tapper is far more intelligent and sensible than many of his profession. If he tells you that you are not to be slogging through the Wissahickon in this weather, you must desist with your daily slog. Your lungs are fragile, my love. I would not have you expiring for a sight of interesting lichen. Love is one of two things worth dying for. I have yet to decide on the second. It is most certainly not colorful fungus.

  I shall be home as soon as this business is settled, certainly no more than a week. My mother complains that you will not have her to dinner. Good for you. Take pity on Hamilton’s new wife and have her to tea. Fire the cook, please. I cannot face another dish of sweetbreads.

  With all my love always,

  Edward

  • • •

  From Incomplete: The Life and Art of Edward Willing, by Ash Anderson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983:

  The academy exhibition of April 1902 marked a notable departure from Willing’s past style. Rather than the small brushstrokes and sunlit colors so characteristic of his earlier works, this collection was bolder and darker. Missing, too, were his familiar depictions of single persons. A local critic wrote:

  While one might expect either the complete absence or overwhelming presence of the late Mrs. Willing in this collection, one would, perhaps, be justified in feeling startled by the complete lack of any people whatsoever. It is as if Willing has excised all human contact from his sphere, finding his muse instead in the flat gray of the Schuylkill River or the lumpen boulders of the Wissahickon Valley. While there is no question that Willing’s work has been, through the years, alternately tolerable and uninspired, his pitiable loss of just over two years ago might inspire a bit of sympathetic latitude. However, for my part, I left the exhibition feeling very low-spirited and slightly damp. (9)

  For the next three years, Willing traveled extensively (see Chapter 20), and completed the eight uniquely abstract landscapes that came to be known as the Elysium series. (10) The only known portrait from that time was one commissioned by a Willing family friend, art collector, and philanthropist John Girard Hamilton, before Diana’s death. As it was to be of Hamilton’s wife, the sittings were understandably postponed, and the picture was not completed until mid-1905. For the remainder of his life, Willing would paint very few portraits, although he did resume the use of models for figure studies sometime in 1906 . . .

  Notes

  Chapter 19 (cont.)

  (9) Stuyvesant Gumm, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 17, 1902. Gumm was never kind in his reviews of Willing, and in fact once publicly called him a “s**t-shoveler.”

  (10) A somewhat ironic term, as the titles: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, and Fraud are reminiscent of Dante’s Circles of Hell. While there is no direct evidence of its presence there, Betrayal is assumed to have been lost in the Jordan Cooper Gallery fire of December 1905.

  13

  THE MAGIC

  “Okay, people. I’m throwing all caution to the wind. Ha. Taking a leap of faith. And assuming you finished reading Gulliver’s Travels. I thought I’d shake things up a little, upset the status quo, so to speak, and try something new. Let’s really splash out here and have you be . . . Reviewers. Like in the New York Times Book Review. Lay it on me. Tell me what you think . . . Anyone? . . . Anyone? Yes, great, Alexander. Your review.”

  “It was somewhat lacking in magic, Mr. Stone.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, this class is called the Magical World. So, if I were to compose a review, I think I would have to begin with, ‘For a book intended to represent a magical realm, it was somewhat lacking in magic.’”

  “Mr. Bainbridge, I would expect such glibness from some of your . . . peeps, is it? But you are usually a gentleman of sensibility.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Stone. But I’m being totally serious. Gulliver’s Travels is at best an adventure story. Maybe not exactly the wildest and hairiest . . . but, anyway. It’s not magical. It’s just satire, pretty much aimed at government. It tells us the stupid, ineffective way things truly are. Okay, so some of the folks in charge are actually talking horses, but that’s not magic. That’s just Washington.”

  “Quiet, people. Yes, yes, very clever. Your point, Alexander?”

  “My point is this. In magical things, it’s all about the way things could be. Right? If we just look at them a little differently. And about that feeling that the whole world has been, I don’t know . . . repainted. Or totally turned upside down.”

  “I’m still not getting you. So . . .”

  “So, maybe, Mr. Stone, and I say this with all due respect, we should be reading The Lord of the Rings. Or American Gods. Harry Potter. Something where the magic is . . . well, there.”

  “Ah. Of course. Harry Potter. Believe me, I know how you all feel about anything older than you are, but established and classic does not necessarily imply difficult and without value.”

  “Believe me, Mr. Stone, I hear you. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that if you follow the same logic, new and different doesn’t automatically imply inferior and worthless?”

  “Rejoice, Mr. Bainbridge. We will be reading Le Morte d’Arthur later in the term. And our next subject is Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Oh, people. Come on. It’s about beaches and monsters. Great stuff. Just great . . .”

  14

  THE QUESTION

  Chloe’s was crowded, even for a Saturday. Sadie and I had to settle for a table near the back. We knew Frankie would complain, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.

  “Fried cheese,” Sadie said, not even bothering with the menu. “Moussaka, tiramisu, and something with lots and lots of olives.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Today,” she informed me, “I have eaten a cup of miso soup and three sheets of toasted seaweed.” Her mother was back. “She weighed me.”

  “Oh, Sades.”

  “She actually made me stand on the scale in her bathroom. After she’d been on it.”

&nb
sp; Mrs. Winslow has one of those scales you see in doctors’ offices, with the slidy metal bars. It gets you right to the ounce. And doesn’t go back to zero unless you make it.

  “Oh, Sadie,” I said again.

  “Guess.”

  “No, I wouldn’t—”

  “Not me, you doof. Her.”

  I didn’t want to do that, either. “Um. One twenty-five . . . ?”

  Sadie snorted. “As if.”

  It’s rare to see her upset like this. When Sadie goes all hard-edged and humorless, it’s serious. I never know quite what to say to make anything better, let alone everything. That’s her domain.

  Thank God Frankie arrived just then, paper bag from the repair counter in hand. He dropped into his chair with a sniff. “You couldn’t have gotten a table all the way out in the alley?” He hadn’t seen Sadie’s face. Momentary blissful ignorance. He pulled a pair of vintage wingtips out of the bag and examined one heel closely. “He’s good,” he announced after a minute. “Schizophrenic, but good, our friend Stavros.”

  Stavros was, at the moment, somewhere in the recesses of the building, cooking. When at Chloe’s, I tend to avoid thinking about the fact that the hands making my souvlaki and tsatsiki have spent at least part of the day holding the bottoms of other people’s shoes. When neither of us said anything, Frankie looked up. And sighed. “Right.” In the smoothest of moves, he stowed the shoes under the table and folded his hands on top. “Who?”

  I tilted my head toward Sadie.

  “Guess how much my mother weighs,” she challenged him.

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Your mother is a cow. A skinny cow, to be sure, but a cow nonetheless.”

  That earned him the ghost of a smile. “One-seventeen,” Sadie said sadly. “Soaking wet. I could still see her footprints from when she got out of the shower.”

  Frankie looked to me. “Weight check,” I mouthed.

  “Ah. Well, shall we send her an anonymous note that Marino here weighs fifteen pounds less than that?”

  “Ella is five-one. My mother is five-seven.”

  She had us there.

  “She told me I look like a potato.”

  “That,” Frankie snapped, “might just be unforgivable.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It’s not!” We didn’t jinx-dibs each other; it wasn’t the moment. Beyond the fact that, in her shapeless canvas jacket, Sadie actually did look a little like a potato, we were both hating her mother pretty fiercely just then. Frankie leaned forward and pancaked her hands between his. “Truth or Dare?”

  “Frankie—”

  “Truth or Dare?” he repeated, a command we knew Sadie would no way disobey.

  “Truth.”

  “Okay. Who died and made your mother arbiter of anything that has to do with anything?”

  “What?” She blinked at him. “What kind of truth is that?”

  “An important one.” He tugged until they were nearly nose to nose. “Seriously. Much as it pains me to say it, your mother has pretty crap taste in . . .” He let go of Sadie’s hands to tick the items off his fingers, right in front of her face. “Gifts, men, clothing, men, music, men, food, and constructive criticism. All the things that matter. Fiorella?”

  “You’re perfect,” I told Sadie, and meant it.

  She snorted again. Frankie snorted back. “Fine,” he said. “You might never take our word for it. But let’s get one thing clear, shall we? Your mother’s current stud has badly capped teeth, a weave, and a spray-on tan.”

  “He does not!”

  “He does. Which tells us everything we need to know about her taste and your eyesight. Hence . . . Fiorella?”

  “You’re perfect,” I said.

  Sadie shook her head, but she was smiling. “You’re nuts.”

  “Whatever.” Frankie flagged down the original Chloe, Stavros’s daughter. She favors black lipstick and spikes, hates waiting tables, and is getting her PhD in infectious diseases. I try not to think about that when she is handing me food. “Order for the table, Miss Winslow.”

  “Moussaka,” Sadie said almost immediately. Then, a little sadly, “No. Wait. Chicken kebabs. Falafel. And a Greek salad.” She paused, opened and shut her mouth, then added, “Extra feta.”

  “You go, girl.” Chloe signaled her approval with a raised fist, and stomped off toward the kitchen.

  Sadie sighed and propped her chin on her hand. Her hair slid forward over her face. Mrs. Winslow’s return had precipitated a trip to Alphonse. “So why is it all about food?” she demanded. To me, “Your family is constantly trying to feed you. Mine starves me. Your mother,” to Frankie, “gives every family dinner the importance of Thanksgiving. All about food, food, food.”

  “But it’s not,” I disagreed, trying not to regret the loss of the moussaka. “Food is just a convenient tool.”

  “Convenient tool.” Frankie was eyeing me with barely veiled amusement. “Do tell.”

  “Look. The thing about food is that we can’t live without it. Right? I mean, barring a life on an IV drip, we have to eat.”

  “I wish I didn’t,” Sadie sighed. “Every day, I wish I could just say no. Admit I am powerless, abstain, and be thin one day at a time.”

  I reached over to squeeze her hand. “Oh, Sades. I think you say no way more often than you should anyway. Because your parents tell you to. Because magazines tell you to. Because it’s all about love or money.”

  “Okay, Fiorella. Have you been drinking?” Frankie demanded.

  “Love or money,” I insisted. “Everything is about love or money. Magazines? All about spending money. Shampoo. Cars. Size-two dresses. And Sadie said it: my family, yours . . . I mean, Marino’s isn’t really about food; it’s about money. Right? And Frankie’s mom is all about making her kids stay still so she can love them.”

  “I’m intrigued.” Frankie folded his arms à la Tim Gunn. “I can’t wait till you explain how Sadie’s Joan Crawford of a mother fits into that tidy little equation.”

  “If food is love, I’m screwed,” Sadie agreed.

  “Too rich or too thin.” I sighed. “Someone famous said that. You can never be too rich or too thin.”

  “The Duchess of Windsor.” Frankie tilted his head thoughtfully. “You might be onto something. The English king gave up the throne to be with her. Skinny bitch. A lot like your mother there, Sadie.”

  “So you’re saying my mother thinks no one will love me if I’m not skinny?”

  “Nope.” He put his hand over mine over hers. “Not really. She can’t imagine how anyone would love her if she weren’t.”

  Sadie gave us both affectionate if exasperated glances. “You’re insane. Love or money. Nothing’s that simple.”

  Sure it is.

  “So, Fiorella the Wise. Home Truth time.” This is Frankie’s variation on Truth or Dare where he gets to ask and answer. Sadie and I have never been quite as enamored of Home Truths as he is. “Ready?”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly. Better to just get it over with.

  “So, if it’s all love or money, which is Alex Bainbridge?”

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “He’s a turd, Ella. He looked right through you like you were a ghost, but you still have a thing for him.”

  “I do n—”

  “Don’t even. You’ve gone through the whole week watching for him. So what is it? I would really like to know. Love or money?”

  “I have not been watching for him!” I snapped. Oh, but I had, in every hallway, at lunch, when I took my seat at the edge of English class. “And if I have, it’s just so I can look away first.”

  Frankie rolled his eyes. “Shall I get you a pail of water?”

  “Why?”

  “Your pants are on fire.”

  I actually looked down at my lap. “Oh, very funny.” I shot Sadie a look when she giggled.

  “Listen, Liar Liar, you promised. Enough with Alex Bainbridge.”

  Home truths are not meant to be
comfortable, I know. Frankie knows it, too, and for a teeny tiny second, I hated him just a teeny tiny bit for knowing just where to stick the pin.

  I glared at him. “How did this go from being about Sadie to an assault on my honesty? Huh?”

  He shrugged. “I love you, Fiorella. We ain’t got no money, honey, but we got love.”

  I’ve never been able to hate Frankie for more than a second at a time.

  “Christ. Who died?”

  We all jumped a little. Daniel Hobbes was there beside the table, looming over us, and no one had seen him arrive. Sadie promptly went wide-eyed and still. Frankie grinned. “What are you doing here?”

  With that same feline grace that awes me in Frankie, Daniel snagged a chair and slid into it, all without looking like he’d moved a muscle. “Ax got busted, and without our guitarist, there is no session. I was on my way home and figured you’d be here. Seemed as good a place to eat as any, although the company might leave something to be desired. You are one sorry-ass-looking trio.”

  “Who asked you?” Frankie shot back. “You can take your uninvited and sorrier-ass face and stuff it elsewhere.”

  It can be dizzying, this insult-as-affection that Frankie and Daniel fling at each other. In the eight or so times I’ve been in Daniel’s presence, I’ve heard him say maybe two nice things to his brother. But it never occurred to me for a second that they weren’t a fierce, unbreakable, and completely united unit.

  People just assume they are identical twins. “It’s the eyes,” Frankie says snarkily. Okay, so beyond the fact that he’s convinced the non-Asian world thinks one epicanthic fold is just like the next, the differences are more subtle than not. Or would be, if it weren’t for ink and accessories. They have the same killer cheekbones and thick, slippery black hair that requires impressive amounts of gel to look Hollywood, the same sculpted mouth. Daniel is taller, but Frankie likes gel, so he adds a good two inches in hair. Frankie looks like he might break your heart a little. Daniel looks like he might rip it from your chest, still beating, and bite it.