The Art Fair by David Lipsky

Author:David Lipsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497663312
Publisher: Open Road Media

Triangle was in the town of Pine Plains—a tiny little town that had the feeling of a western outpost, a few buildings grouped together around the trickle of a street and signs everywhere saying TRIANGLE. We drove through towns that had grand names like Genoa and Biarritz and Lisbon. Whatever ambitions the town fathers had once had to make a mini-Europe here had long ago been disappointed. Pine Plains had been named after some wider experience. There were Pines. There were Plains. That was it. Mom stopped in town and we got sodas—I could see the sweat trickling down her forehead, lightly, and there were little feminine dots of wet in the rough cotton of her tennis shirt. Walking out of the store, to see her leaning against our car gulping down Canada Dry seltzer, I had thought: Yes; that’s my mother. She looked like just what I wanted her to look like. I had turned her into what I wanted her to be.

I have wondered, ever since, why the afternoon was such a disaster. Why from that one nice moment everything else was such a trauma. I did all the things I had learned to do in the art world. Yet the afternoon was a calamity, the worst opening we ever went to. Worse, even, than the first one, where I had gone knowing none of the rules. It was the last time I would ever try to control her. There was the same danger of knowing too many of the rules as knowing none of them: if you knew none, you would blunder and capsize yourself. If you knew too many, your steps became brittle, you took on too much protective ballast, and you capsized yourself. This is what happened that afternoon.

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