IVORY IN PUBLIC
We’re out to dinner and I’m back-lit in blue light, head framed by gilded Buddhist deities in some Wes Anderson tableau. In a mawkish display, I take my hair and sweep it over my right shoulder, angling the opposite side of my neck towards him, lightly brushing it with my hands and meeting his eyes sideways. A spotlight on the thin membranes scarcely masking my jugular. “Does this tableau turn you on?” I ask. I expose one wrist to him then another. “What about this?” The mood is disassociated, but he laughs it off and I join him. There is no ignoring the artifice in art,
the hand prints on cave walls, that mechanical bird. We’re high brow one moment, debased the next. And maybe my performance of a tableau that expresses adulterated instinct does turn him on even if it also depresses him.