Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer

Author:Riva Lehrer [Lehrer, Riva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Risk Pictures: Hillary Chute

By Riva Lehrer and Hillary Chute

2015

CHAPTER 38

Gone Girl

Will and I moved to Cleveland to design the restaurant his sister was about to open in the Flats, a run-down area of downtown. “Sammy’s” overlooked Lake Erie and helped to launch the Cleveland revival. Our new home was a loft in the Flats, right above a dance club. After dinner, we’d go downstairs, exhaust ourselves, and stumble over the sidewalk drunks on our way upstairs to sleep.

Toward the end of the summer, Will drove to Chicago to interview at the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, where he’d twice worked on co-op. He called me from a noisy pay phone in the Loop. “Chen! I got the job, but I have to start on Monday. I’ll stay here and get us an apartment. Start packing.”

Will settled into life as an up-and-coming young professional, while I became a lowly retail robot. Our incomes bore no resemblance to each other; soon, neither did our wardrobes. We’d collected (and shared) over five hundred ties, including pleated, hand-painted silk, and rare block prints; now he waffled in front of his tie rack and worried whether his plain red tie was a tiny bit too…red. I responded by dyeing my hair in hot-pink stripes (in 1981, pink hair stopped traffic) and by shopping at grungy thrift stores in Boystown. One Friday, I showed up at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to meet Will for a round of gallery openings. He ran right past me and straight out the door, panicked that his colleagues would see us together. This was not the man I knew.

By our second year, Will and I had developed separate lives and separate friends at our separate jobs. I started classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. SAIC was a different universe from the University of Cincinnati. The faculty engaged with the full range of contemporary movements, and had little interest in replications of white-man glory. The students were politically engaged, and daring. This was Art School as I’d imagined it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.