“You made it,” Arno said.
Kelli smiled. Arno thought she looked even more Mickey-Mouse-Club-gone-bad than the night before, with her white-blond hair all flat and lanky, too much makeup, and her belly peeking out from above her tight jeans.
“Yeah,” she said. “But I had to tell Jonathan I was going to hear Noam Chomsky speak at NYU about American imperialism before he’d leave me alone.”
“Yeah,” Arno said. “I do that all the time. Give us a kiss.”
Kelli blinked at him.
“We don’t really know each other,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“You’re right,” Kelli said. “So what?” And she grabbed the back of his neck and pushed her body against him and kissed him. They were standing in the middle of Randall Oddy’s show at the Wildenburger gallery in Chelsea, which was a huge white room about four times the size of the gym at Kelli’s school.
For a while earlier in the afternoon Arno had thought that his Blackberry was broken, because it was going off so often with the same number, which turned out to be Amanda’s. Finally, he turned the thing off. He’d been planning to do nothing all day but watch his bootleg Matrix 3 DVD and he didn’t want to deal with Amanda. Worse, he didn’t even want to think about all his best friends being furious at him for doing the thing they’d sworn never to do, which was fool around with each other’s girlfriends. But by the time Keanu had died for the third time, he’d gotten over it.
Now he was blissed out. Kelli was here. He had a simple plan. He was going to blow her away with the scene at the opening, and then he was going to take her back to his house and sleep with her. He didn’t know what girls like her did back in St. Louis, but she certainly seemed willing.
“Let’s go in the back,” Arno said. He grabbed her hand and led her through the crowd, which was made up of hundreds of his mom and dad’s friends and acquaintances.
“Arno, baby!” someone called out. Arno looked around. A tightly knit circle of young men and women opened up and a frenetically handsome young man in a black silk suit and a black T-shirt that said Freaky in yellow letters climbed through his admirers and made his way over to Arno and Kelli.
“Randall,” Arno said. “Hot show. Very hot.”
Arno swept his hands around and gestured at the walls. There were eight paintings of single eyes of very beautiful women caught in mid-wink, so that all the muscles were bulged out and terrifying. They were massive pictures and it took a second to realize what they were. Randall’s last show had been of straining genitals, but he’d grown up a little since then, which was a relief to everyone who worked with him.
“Who’s this?” Randall Oddy asked. He was staring at Kelli, who was staring back. Her lipstick was smeared from kissing Arno.
“Ooh,” Kelli said. And Arno frowned.
“You two headed to the back room? Me, too—you two!” Randall said, and laughed. “Let me find a bottle of Cristal somewhere, and I’ll join you.”
“Great,” Kelli said. “I dig your art.”
“Maybe you can pose for me sometime,” Randall said.
“I definitely want to do that.” Kelli gave Randall a big wink. And as she did, her tongue came out of her mouth, and she used it to adjust her lipstick.
Arno sighed again, and in that moment, he felt something that he knew was far more familiar to guys like David Grobart, which was jealousy of Randall Oddy, a guy who might just be a hair cooler than he was.
As they walked back toward the sale room, Arno’s Blackberry went off again. He took it out of his pocket and dropped it on the floor, and a model wearing heels that came to a point as sharp as a ballpoint pen stepped on it and killed it before suddenly falling down herself, like a capsizing sailboat. And Arno knew inside that right then poor Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, who was probably home all alone, getting ready to go out with her girlfriends, was sitting on her bed and crying, loud.
“Ooh,” Kelli said. “This is even more fun than last night.”
“Yeah,” Arno said.
“I really like your artist friend. He’s like the coolest guy I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Kelli …”
“What?” She was looking around at the crowd. People stood in groups, with their backs to the paintings, telling stories and exchanging information on where to go later. Some were invited to the post-opening dinner for Randall Oddy, which would take place at La Luncheonette, over on Tenth Avenue. The rest would have to make do with smaller dinners of their own, where everyone would do nothing but talk about what was going on at the La Luncheonette dinner, which actually wouldn’t be much fun, but they’d never know that because they weren’t invited.
“What?” Kelli asked again, simply. Arno could see that Kelli was eyeing the outfits on some of the women and glancing down at her tight jeans and cheap black rayon blouse.
“You’re so …” Arno trailed off. He’d been about to tell her that he really liked her, but then he caught himself. He guided her into the private sale room. A white bearskin rug was the only object in the room besides a couple of black chairs and a particularly pornographic Randall Oddy painting Arno’s parents had hung on the wall.
He looked at Kelli. She was hot, sure, but that didn’t mean he’d have to go caring about her or anything. Just ’cause she wasn’t like anyone else he knew—so what? Wasn’t nobody like anybody else? Hadn’t he learned that in school? He closed the door and crossed his fingers, hoping that Randall Oddy had forgotten them and he could have Kelli all to himself.
“What a beautiful rug,” Kelli said. She squatted down and stroked the fur and Arno stood behind her, looking at the foot-long jaguar tattoo that appeared when her shirt rode up.
“Yeah,” she said, swiveling around to face him. “I got it when I was a freshman. It’s our school mascot. Dorky, huh?”
“Maybe you’d like to lie down.”
“On a rug like this, that’s a really good idea,” Kelli said.
“Hey, what’s up, you two—are you going anywhere interesting after this?” Randall Oddy stood in the doorway, holding two bottles of Cristal and some plastic party cups. Arno and Kelli slowly stood up.
“It’s your party, Oddy,” Kelli said, making the two words rhyme.
“It’s a party only if a girl like you is along for the ride.”
“Huh,” Arno said, low. He glanced over at Kelli, who had already forgotten all about the rug. Randall handed him a glass of champagne and they all raised their cups.
“What’s the toast?” Kelli asked. She linked arms with Oddy and stared up at him.
“To us,” Randall said. “Let’s all hang out only with each other all night long!”
“I was just thinking how much fun that would be,” Arno said, but he didn’t smile.