The Children(96)

“No.”

“Do you know anyone else who would? Or a way to get in touch with him? Do you have his number?”

“No. And he’s changed his number since I knew him.”

“Have you talked to—”

“I haven’t heard a word from him since he dropped me.”

“Then why am I here?” She tried to say it calmly. Candy suggested she try Arlene, Guin still wasn’t sure she was being sincere. “You could’ve told me this on the phone.”

Arlene’s face was bare of makeup, her mouth blueish with wine. She bit her blue lip and with surprising tenderness said, “I know what it’s like for Ennis to leave you.”

Guin expected plenty of things from Arlene, but not sympathy. Not commiseration. She spoke slowly, so her voice wouldn’t shake. “You don’t know anything.”

“Girl. We were together every day for a year. Then he cut me off like I was a stranger.”

“Girl,” Guin said. “We were together every day for the first eleven years of my life.”

Even as she said it, she was doing the math. Arlene’s one year of knowing Ennis the adult, the fully formed artist, set against the tangled thicket of their shared childhood. Limned with longing and faded by distance, warped by what came after. Maybe Arlene knew more about Ennis than she ever would.

Then: two children dashed through her mind. Racing over a summer hollow, their woods spread around them like the cape of a forest god. Bare feet startling grasshoppers from the brush, so they pelted their skin in an unholy rain.

No, she decided. This pretty dilettante did not know Ennis best.

Arlene didn’t seem offended, only interested. She’d always made Guin nervous. It was the headlong fearlessness that poured from her. Those tilted eyes glinting like solar panels, charged not by sun but contact—with people, the world. She was an absolute extrovert, peeled like a fruit to her vibrating core. She slung back her drink in a cowboy swallow and said, “Ennis and I met at a party in Silver Lake.”

Good god, she was starting at the beginning. Guin mastered her expression.

“I was there with my boss, she introduced us. He was . . . gorgeous.” She paused, ran her eyes over Guin’s Ennis face with an appetite so frank Guin felt it in her knees. “I made it my goal for the night to meet him, talk to him, seduce him, ideally. Sexually or otherwise. I wasn’t sure whether he liked women. He did—does—we went home together, we were burn-it-to-the-ground in love for a year. You know that part. Before we met, though, I went to the opening of one of his shows. Whirlybird.”

Guin flinched. She’d been there, too, trying to infiltrate. That blue-suited heavy tossed her out at the door.

Whirlybird was Ennis’s last paintings show. A collection of large portraits with a welling, witchy clarity that made it seem as if every figure lay beneath a skin of clear water. His subjects were various stripes of modern clairvoyant, surrounded kinglike by their devices: tarot decks, crystals, palmistry maps; cracked cell phones, metal bangles, American Spirits.

“I didn’t see that show,” Guin said. “Just photos.”

A burst of laughter came from the next room. “Yo, Lena, can Bagel drink wine?” someone yelled.

“Grapes are dog poison!” Arlene yelled back. “Degenerates. Anyway. Whirlybird. Did you hear about the phone booth?”

“Phone booth?”

“At the end of the exhibit, tucked away. It wasn’t an actual booth, it was a little room with a phone, like in an old hotel. The door was recessed in this way that made it blend in, I wasn’t sure it was even part of the show. It was unlocked, though, and when I opened it, I saw the phone. Bright red, one of those old-school beasts you dial with your finger. It didn’t seem to be plugged into anything, but I picked it up. Just to see.

“When I put my ear to it, straight off a voice on the other end starts talking. I figured the artist—Ennis—had hired an old-school phone psychic. Like Miss Cleo. Cool, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe,” Arlene echoed. “The voice, though. It was—it sounded like . . . oh, I don’t know. This was years ago. I remember thinking it was . . .”

She cut a glance at Guin and changed course. “I go to a lot of art shows. Most of them at least reach for meaning, even if they don’t get there. Then there’s the work that pretends to be saying something, when you can feel it’s totally void. Venal pretentious garbage. Then once in a great while you see something so real it has you questioning your entire life.

“What I thought then was, This show is good. It’s crowd-pleasing and beautifully executed, and no matter what, people will be watching what Ennis Sharpe does next. But this. This weird little booth, this voice on the phone. It’s the one really meaningful thing in the place.”

“What did the voice say?”

“I don’t remember.”

Arlene was lying. Guin let it go. “Whose voice? Man or woman?”

Her pause was too long. “Female.”

Unease ruffled Guin’s skin. She kept her poker face on.

“Anyway. Even when Ennis and I started dating, I never asked him about it. Then . . .” Arlene wet her lip. “Did you see Live at the Evernight? His motel show?”

Guin had read about it. In 2022, Ennis took over an abandoned eight-room motel in the Nevada desert, transforming it into an installation that was hailed as a visual story collection. Seedy and saturated, earthy and evocative, playing on themes of voyeurism, isolation, hauntings, the great tawny weave of the American dream frayed halfway to pieces. To loosely quote Artforum.