Starry Night

by Isabel Gillies

“Oh my god, what isn’t there to love?” She took her cat eyes away from the park and flashed them up at Nolan. I think she even batted them. Now I was getting hot and felt super crunched. I involuntarily pushed out a little like I needed space and sort of elbowed Nolan. “Oh, here—let me move over, you look jammed in there.” He shifted toward Reagan. Why did I wear the dress? “I’m fine, I think my leg is just falling asleep.”

  “I have some room over here,” Reagan purred, sliding her narrow figure over toward the door. I felt Nolan’s leg that had been so close to mine move away. “Thanks,” he and I said at the same time.

  “We’re almost there, kids,” Oliver announced, looking out his window at the huge alabaster museum. It took up almost three blocks opposite the fancy apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue.

  As our car approached the Met, I could see photographers’ cameras flashing and a steady stream of yellow taxis lining up to let out their partygoers. Forget Nolan, I thought. Reagan obviously had her sights on him. She’d get him, with her dark, silky hair, intense green eyes, and big boobs. Reagan is Teen Vogue’s wet dream, and probably a boy like Nolan’s too. I love her, I really do—she’s one of my oldest friends—but she’s, well, she gets what she wants.

  * * *

  The car eased along the curb and came to a barely noticeable stop. My mother’s car must have arrived first because Vati, Farah, and Charlie rushed up to our car and Charlie opened the door on my side, before the driver could do it. I realized that those fifteen minutes might very well be the only ones I would ever spend so close to that gorgeous Bronx Science boy. As Charlie swung open the door, all of the mixed-sexes-new-boy-hot-car-close-proximity energy flew out like heat from an oven and the sharp November chill slapped some sense into me.

  “Wrenny! Come out, this is so cool. Look at the photographers!”

  “Oh god, Charlie, don’t say that out loud—how uncool, of course there are photographers,” Farah said, and bonked him on the arm with her clutch.

  “Oh sorry, Miss New York City, I think I know that. I might remind you Nosh is catering this event.” He patted his hair down again.

  “I think photographers are cool, Charlie,” I said. “Maybe we can get one to take a picture of all of us. Right, Farah?”

  Farah headed for the stairs. “I’m sorry, Charlie, I know your dad does these things all the time and of course you know about them.”

  “I do.” Charlie bucked up and straightened his tie.

  Last-minute adjustments happened in front of the mighty, illuminated museum as we tugged our dresses, wraps, and hair. Oliver and Nolan started heading up to the party. Senior boys, even if one is your dreadlock-haired brother, are old—they are like adults. Nolan put his hands in his pockets and swaggered.

  An event organizer dressed in a tux with a microphone in his ear pulled my mother away from a quick hello she was having with another elegantly clad woman and escorted her up the stairs to my father, who was trotting down, hair slicked back, and smiling. Dad looks as natural in a tux as a country singer looks in jeans and a T-shirt. He thanked the party planner, took my mother’s hand, lifted it up to admire her, and then brought her in to kiss her on the cheek. She smiled and said something to him just as they got to the top of the stairs, then Dad turned around.

  “Darlings! Come inside!” He beckoned to us. “Wrenny! You look beautiful down there!” That made Oliver and Nolan look back at me to see what Dad was yelling about. I must have been purple with embarrassment, because Nolan gave me the thumbs-up and I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with Dad or making fun of me.

  “I saw that,” Farah said, as she screwed the lip-gloss top back on and put it in her clutch. “He’s into you. Let’s go.” My heart leaped with hope. Farah may like inappropriately older guys, but she’s smart about looks and the vibes people give.

  “Wait,” Charlie said, not hearing what Farah had said to me. “To keep body and soul together”—he pulled a small brown paper bag out of his blazer pocket—“Swedish Fish.”

  14

  “Well, well, well,” said Bennet, by far my favorite guard at the museum. He was standing right at the entrance when we walked through the gigantic doors.

  Bennet sounds like Usain Bolt, the Olympic runner. He’s Jamaican. “Look at cha, Wren, all grown up!” He leaned back, clapped his hands, and laughed out loud. “Whooo, you look like a ripe peach, dear. Someone might pick you toNIGHT.” Bennet has been a guard at the museum for forty years. My father asks him where certain works are because Bennet knows the place better than anyone.

  “Bennet!” I gave him the high five he was waiting for even though his peach comment made me flush.

  “Go have a good time tonight, little one. It’s a big pa-ty,” he said, leaning in and lifting his pointer finger up into the air. “Ha haaaaa!”

  When I was eight or nine, Bennet used to give me Life Savers when I came to visit Dad. He knew I liked cherry so he would sort through all the other colors with his thumb until he got to a bright red one. “Here’s one with your name on it,” he’d say, and press the hard candy into the palm of my hand. Even though I had the sweet red taste of a Swedish Fish left over in my mouth and I was too old for a special treat, the gigantic party ahead of me gave me a funny feeling in my gut, like maybe I wished for just a second I could be eight years old again and loose in the museum, running in my Tretorns and pigtails through the hallways, holding on to a sticky, melting Life Saver.

  “I’m going to find my parents and say hi,” Charlie said.

  “Okay, we’ll be in here, I guess, until we go in to dinner?” I said, looking at the girls.

  “Right, I’ll find you. Make sure to try the Peking duck rolls. My dad said they are insane.”

  “Good,” I said, looking into the sea of silks, furs, and clinking glasses. I scanned the waiters’ trays to see if I could identify the duck thing, and at the same time I looked for Nolan.

  “Where is Oliver?” Padmavati said, not thinking, like I did, to mask her obsession by looking for a tray of roaming hors d’oeuvres.

  “Vati.” Farah took her by the hands. “Listen to me, okay?” She was speaking to her like a life coach. “You look exceptional tonight. That pink color is doing something amazing to your skin and you are like eleven feet tall, but I am telling you, Oliver is never going to notice you if you are acting so puppy dog-ish. Never, ever, not ever.”

  “Oh yeah, okay. So what should I do, look busy? But how? I don’t have my phone.”

  “No, Vati,” I said, and fixed her dangly, sparkly Indian beaded earring that was twisted in a weird way. “Just be yourself. Hang with me. Let’s go see if there is anyone famous here or something.”

  “Just stick with me, guys, okay?” Vati said, and touched her earring.

  “Totally,” I vowed. And then everyone nodded their head, confirming that nobody would leave her side.

  “Come on, let’s do a circle and see if we can’t take a glass of champagne from one of the waiters. The bartenders probably won’t give us any,” Reagan said, leading us into the party.

  “I’m sure my parents will let us have a little champagne at dinner, you guys,” I said. Sometimes they do let me have a glass of wine at dinner, I guess because my father is European.

  “Oh, Wren, come on! Look at this party!” Reagan said and hooked her arm in mine. “We need a glass of champagne immediately!”

  Photographers were asking to take people’s pictures (and then writing down their names, which meant they were important enough to be in the paper the next day), swank, literary-looking couples, artists, the mayor of New York, Troland Johnson, who was standing with the Met’s blog guy and Cy Dowd—the most prominent artist at the opening. The show had at least seven of his paintings in it, all of them new (all of them written about in New York magazine and Art World and The New York Times). The idea behind the show was to present the old masters and the new masters. It was unusual for the Met to exhibit so many current artists, which was one of the reasons the show w
as such a big deal.

  Reagan released my arm to snake her way through the crowd and I let Vati and Farah move ahead of me. They didn’t recognize Cy Dowd. He looked younger than I would have thought, even though he had gray hair on the sides of his head. He wore heavily framed black nerd glasses, which didn’t surprise me, and a navy tux. You might not notice it was navy, but because Cy was standing next to the mayor, who was in a normal black tux, I could tell. I think it’s some sort of statement to wear navy instead of traditional black. George Clooney does it all the time at the Golden Globes. And Cy Dowd was wearing blue Vans sneakers. I wondered what he wore when he painted. I wondered if he liked these big parties, or if he was an introvert who wished that the evening would be over and he could go back to his massive studio in Brooklyn, drink red wine, and paint his next masterpiece with his pet teacup pig by his side (I read that he had one in that New York magazine article).

  The cavernous, marble entry hall was loud. All the party guests were talking to each other intensely, as if they were in the most important conversation of their lives. Some people would explode in laughter. What were they laughing at? Politics? I wanted to retreat to my bedroom and draw an owl or something. I felt like that big wind of the day was in the hall with us, blowing everything and making me feel like I had to hold on.

  Suddenly I heard my father’s voice in a microphone.

  “Hello … Hello, everyone!”

  Nan and David Noorlander (at these things they seem more like Nan and David Noorlander than Mom and Dad) were standing at the foot of the large white marble stairway leading to the upstairs galleries that held Vermeers, Manets, Monets, Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (I wrote a paper on that painting in an art history elective once), and of course, a large number of van Goghs.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed guests, Mr. Mayor, dear friends, it is my greatest pleasure and honor to welcome you all tonight. It is rare, even at this great institution, that we can erect a show with the work of so many vital contemporary artists. How lucky we are to be living in a time when we are globally connected and have the technology and resources to be in an active, alive, real-time conversation with artists from around the world who, it seems to me, are working together as if in a master class. Some, like Rosanna Zelman, live in Kyrgyzstan. Tony Une resides in Tokyo. Alexandra Sheere, in Paris. For the first time at the Met, we have tried to continue that conversation in the galleries you are about to see. We are truly fortunate to have with us tonight Cy Dowd, who has seven works in this show.”

  The room exploded in applause. Vati, Farah, and I were, totally by accident, standing so close to Cy Dowd that it felt like everyone in the room was looking at us, which of course they weren’t. Cy lifted his glass to my father and then took a small bow to the crowd. But then, when he lifted his head, he unmistakably looked in our direction, not at me, but at Farah. They caught eyes. You could see it as plainly as if it were a scene in a TV show. Was it because Farah was in a silver dress? I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, and there was Charlie who was now back with us. I took his sleeve and pulled him closer to me.

  “Did you see that?” I didn’t really have to lower my voice because the whole room was still applauding.

  “What?” He had found the duck things and had a pyramid of them in a napkin. “Why do you guys have champagne?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “They do.” Pointing his pile of duck in Farah and Padmavati’s direction.

  Farah was now coyly poised with her knee bent like a fawn and smiling at Cy Dowd. Thank god Dad was talking again or she might have taken her spindly legs and stepped her platforms right over to him.

  “As a boy growing up in Amsterdam, I spent hour upon hour in the Rijks, studying and falling in love with the masterpieces of the Golden Age. How I wished I could have met these artists. How I wished I could have spoken to them, asked about their technique, their visions, what they ate for dinner!”

  Titters rippled through the great hall. I looked over at Cy, who was laughing and side looking at Farah, who caught his glance and was throwing a bigger one in his direction.

  “It is like a dream come true for me, but I am quite sure for all of us.”

  More applause.

  “The board of directors and I welcome you. We hope you enjoy what you see in the gallery, and later, we invite you to join us in the Temple of Dendur for what is sure to be a delicious celebratory dinner. Proost!” Everyone in the great hall echoed the Dutch toast back to my father.

  “Proost!”

  As the guests raised their glasses, I finally caught sight of Oliver and Nolan standing at the entrance of the Egyptian gallery. I watched them say something to each other and then Nolan disappeared through the small arch that leads to the tombs and pharaohs.

  “I’ll be right back. Stay here,” I said to Charlie.

  “Have one of these, I’m not kidding you, they will blow your mind.” He looked at me and nodded like his family had invented Peking duck.

  “Oh thanks, I’m starving.” I took the tiny, still-warm egg roll and, without thinking for a second about what I was wearing, crunched into its middle. Of course the very amazing-tasting, but hot, goopy brown duck juice squirted out both sides of the roll, flew up into the air, and landed like a Rorschach test splatter on both sides of the skirt of my dress. Had I been wearing a little fitted dress, the juice would have hit the floor. Or since I was dressed in a one-of-a-kind vintage Oscar de la Renta, I could have paused to consider cause and effect, like a careful person.

  “Charlie! My god.” I sucked air in. “Ohhh, look!”

  “Oh crap—I should have told you they were sort of juicy.”

  “Shoot shoot shoot. Do you have another napkin?”

  Mortifyingly enough, a mom-looking woman next to us grabbed cocktail napkins from a passing Nosh waiter and started blotting my skirt.

  “Gracious, it’s really in there. Let me just…” blot, blot, blot, “… never scrub or it will stain forever. You might have to take this to a very good dry cleaner, dear, but it will come out, I am sure of it. Oh what a shame, this is a beautiful dress.”

  “Thanks,” I said anxiously. At the opposite end of the hall, Oliver was making his way toward the bar.

  “I’m really sorry, Wren.” Charlie had his mouth full with another duck bomb.

  “It’s not your fault.” I looked at the concerned woman. “Thanks, I just have to catch someone.”

  “Don’t do anything until a professional can get their hands on it.”

  “Okay!” I bolted through the maze of people to Oliver, who was now at the bar getting himself a beer. I had to wedge myself between grownups to get to him.

  “Having a beer? How do they even serve you?”

  “Yuuuup.” He smiled and I thought he might burp because that is something he would do at a moment like that. I was extremely aware of the plum-brown stains that were drying and deepening into the fabric of my mother’s dress. “They don’t know how old I am, it’s not like we’re at a bar. It’s a private party.”

  “Oh. Can I have a sip?”

  “Sure.” I took the glass filled to the top with the just-poured foaming beer and took a big swig. Bitter and bubbly.

  “Easy there, sister.”

  “Yuck.” I handed back the glass and got down to business.

  “So who is Nolan?”

  “Why do you want to know?” He smiled.

  “What? I just rode in a car with him and, nothing. I’m just interested—he’s at this party like out of nowhere.”

  “He’s in this band I went to see last weekend. We hung out afterward.”

  “Why did you invite him?” I said, reaching for his beer for another sip and then changing my mind.

  “Benjer couldn’t come because of some swim meet he has tomorrow—his mom wouldn’t let him, so I invited Nolan.”

  “But why? You don’t even know him.”

  “So what? And I do know him, sort of. He friended me on
Facebook at the same time Ben said he was out, so.” He took a sip of beer.

  “What’s the band called?” I asked.

  “The Shoppe Boys.”

  My heart started beating in that weird way again. “Are they good?”

  “Hell yeah they are. They are so good. And he’s so good.”

  “He is?”

  “Yeah, man, he’s like Eddie Vedder. He’s got a sick voice—I don’t know if he’ll even go to college. They might get signed and go on tour or something. I’m getting him a beer too.”

  “Why didn’t he come get it himself—what are you, his groupie or something?”

  “No.” Oliver had no reaction to my dis because he was a senior and not much flustered him. He was a math guy who would probably get into MIT early-decision. He took a calculus class at Columbia just for fun. I don’t get genetics. “He went to look at the hieroglyphics with Reagan.”

  “What?” I said in a way-too-elevated way. I felt my hand tighten into a ball.

  “You have something in your hair.” He pulled out a shred of a leaf.

  “Nolan was with Reagan, like, with her? I mean, no, I don’t care, but…”

  Oliver cocked his head. “I guess. No, I don’t know.”

  “That’s cool. She looked like she liked him in the car,” I said tentatively.

  “I didn’t think she did,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, well, I’m going to find Vats. I said I wouldn’t leave her side, and I did.”

  “Okay, you do that.” Oliver, with his dreads and his beer, could be so dismissive.

  15

  Padmavati was standing by herself in the middle of the room holding a full glass of champagne.

  “Have you been holding that the entire time?” I said, watching Oliver go into the tombs.

  “No, this is my second glass.” Her already enormous Betty Boop eyes opened even more.

  “That is nuts, Vati, you are going to throw up.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do. You disappeared and then so did Farah.”