Grace glares at her. Lena’s cloying soccer-mom-from-Minnesota expression never changes. Grace then turns to me, in some sort of desperate appeal. I shrug, and look toward the other plain-clothes cop, who has taken the email from her and whose neck is flaring in red liver spots as he reads it.
Lena points at the email in his hand. — You now have to take this up with the individual in question.
Grace flushes, glancing at her fellow officer. Trying to claw back some power, she barks, — Rest assured: we will do just that!
But she’s like a cocker spaniel trying to impersonate a pit bull. Lena reads it as such. — Good luck with that one, she smiles as Grace and her colleague exit, grimly. We watch them instruct the two guys to wheel the empty cart away and load it back into the truck.
When did she get those balls? Lena played those suckers and they backed the fuck down! Mind you, I had always suspected that Grace (the pussy formerly known as hot) was a little gun-shy.
And the big bones sit in there, the pelvis and the skull, suspended in Lena’s translucent sculpture like big chunks of fruit in Molly Sorenson’s Jell-O. I dunno if they are Jerry’s bones. They could just as easily have come out of one of her molds that the police took away. All I know is that the wealthy buyer intends to donate the piece to the Art Institute in Chicago, in the new modern art wing. I never asked Lena, although I know I will someday, but I really do hope that it is the vestiges of Jerry in there. I kind of like the idea of him being on permanent display in his alma mater. I think, in a strange way, that he might be at peace with such an arrangement.
Of course, if it is Jerry in there, life would have been so much simpler had we stuck to a version of the truth. Lena was working on an art project, I was looking after her house. Jerry came by, tricked his way in, and ransacked the place. I asked him to leave, he refused, he attacked me, and I accidentally killed him in self-defense.
But I think Lena tore off and intervened in the way she did probably not out of revenge over Jerry, but simply because she was an artist, and the authentic materials to finish her compelling project were suddenly at her disposal. Like Dad with his crappy novels, the world and the people in it are all just potential resources to those ruthless scavengers!
So once again Lena is making a big splash in the art world. She’s still basking in the success of her recent photography exhibition, the one that shows her getting fat, retitled A Year of Boy Trouble. Melanie Clement exhibited the photos at her GoToIt gallery to considerable acclaim. We had a great night at the subsequent Miami show a few weeks back. It was like old times; Chef Dominic, Emilio, Jon Pallota, Lester, Angie Forrest (whom I used to know as Henrietta James, and who occasionally babysits for Nelson), and even Mindy Tuck (the Liposuction Fuck) were all present to show support and, of course, to party. At the launch of the exhibition, Lena graciously repeated her acknowledgment from the catalog. — I couldn’t have done it without the assistance of both Lucy Brennan and Jerry Whittendean, who, in their different ways, really did enable my art career.
So I guess it’s true, as all those crappy books tell us, that great art is made out of a meeting of opposites. And this also might be true about great sex. Right now I can hear Lena putting Nelson to bed, and I’m hoping that the little guy gets down to sleep real soon. Real fucking soon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Chris Andreko, Sarah Kahn, Emer Martin, Amy Cherry, Don De Grazia, Jon Baird, Trevor Engleson, Alex Mebed, Robin Robertson, Gerry Howard, Katherine Fry and, most of all, Elizabeth Quinn.
To various trainers, artists and friends in Chicago, Miami, London and Edinburgh, for not being Lucy and Lena.
To everybody who has bought the books and watched the films and thus saved me from having to get a proper job for years.
Irvine Welsh