“I don’t even like art,” she heard herself say, and rather forcefully. “My father collects paintings. He’s always running around after them and fawning over them and spending probably a lot of money to buy them, and then he just hides them away someplace in Brooklyn and goes to look at them on his own. I’ve never even been there.”
It was the most critical thing she had ever said about Salo, at least to another person, and now she was saying it to a total stranger? It made no sense, and of course there was now a barely suppressed look of shock on the woman’s face, even if she was trying to cover it up by smiling, as if what Sally had just said were witty or hilarious. Then she said, “My name is Stella. What’s your name?”
But Sally didn’t want to say her name. She just wanted to keep on doing what she was doing, which was looking into the woman’s—Stella’s—smile, and at the pink scar at her collarbone, and the long coiling dreadlocks down that lovely back. But she forced her gaze away.
“I’m so sorry,” Sally said. “You know, I think you’re right about those girls. I guess I didn’t realize how upset I was. I’m just going to wash my face.” She forced herself to her feet, the wedge shifting uncomfortably in her underpants. She might have missed our father’s arrival by now, which meant at the very least that she’d have to repeat her reconnaissance mission around the galleries but which also might mean, if she was particularly unlucky, that Salo was standing near the door to the women’s room with his girlfriend, and that there’d be no way to not be seen by him when she tore herself away and went out there.
“Well, okay,” the woman said. “If you’re all right.”
“Of course I’m all right,” Sally said. Even to herself she sounded borderline insulted. “I mean, thank you, I appreciate your concern.”
Stella nodded, and to Sally’s great relief she turned without another word and left the bathroom, and Sally thought what a kindness it would be to never have to see this woman’s face （or her back） again for the rest of her life, although she would never forget the humiliation and mystery of this encounter, not ever, even without what happened next.
She went back into a stall and （unnecessarily） switched out the wedge of rolled-up toilet paper, and then, her face still flushed with embarrassment but at least newly washed, she left the bathroom herself. Her father wasn’t there, just outside the door, and he wasn’t there in the lobby, or in the main gallery, but in the farthest corner of the farthest room from the entrance she encountered, again, the unmistakable contours of that lovely dark back, Stella’s back, and the hand on that back—intimate, unhurried, and, even from where she stood, across the room, obviously full of love—was instantly recognizable to Sally, and would have been even without the utterly known body attached to it.
She stood for a long moment watching the two of them, watching the space between their bodies narrow and widen and narrow again as they spoke to each other with unmistakable familiarity and ease, not caring that either or both of them might at any moment turn and notice her. She was as appalled at herself as she was at Salo. She was enraged that his was the hand permitted to touch this woman’s back （and, Sally now inferred, every other part of her）， which was awful and unfair, and it made her feel sick and it made her feel deeply angry and it made her hate our father, which had never been true before that night but which was going to be true after it, and also she hated the woman, Stella, with her beautiful smile and coiling dreadlocks and kindness. Sally had to fight an urge to rush at them through the crowds and pound them with her newly washed fists, even as she also wanted to run out onto Columbus Avenue and far away from them, and all the others who dressed up to drink wine and look at repellant—but also undeniably beautiful—scenes of tortured children. Either act would have served to bring this ill-judged and horrendously successful expedition—successful because she’d actually done what she’d gone there to do, and learned the thing she’d gone there to learn—to the same pathetic conclusion, but it still took Sally ages to actually turn away from them and go.