Graceless

I was just catching my breath.  The group was moving through the rooms so quickly the paintings blurred into streaks like median lines glimpsed from a speeding car.

I’ve heard the jokes, darling.  The catty, lacquer-haired boy at the café this morning railed against those “idiots from Indiana” who can’t appreciate art.  His suggestion, this boy who arrived two years ago, starry-eyed and twanging away with Mid-West kindness, was to post a photo of the buffoon at all museums as a warning.  I do get tired of recent transplants doing their best impression of jaded New Yorker, darling, but I couldn’t very well correct him without blowing my cover.

You imagined I was shorter, fatter, frizzy-haired, dressed in a once-white sweatshirt silk-screened with frolicking cats.  You pictured white tennis shoes with white socks, maybe glasses worn on a chain – a woman accustomed to awkwardness and embarrassment.  You could pity that woman; maybe even applaud her for trying to better herself through continuing education classes.

I know I shouldn’t have worn those ridiculous heels.  That inane “click-click” sound they made while I tried to keep up with the group will taunt me always.  “Click-click!  Click-click!”  Then, finally, the group stopped and I had my chance to rest, take some deep breaths and shift my weight from one aching foot to the other.  And then I did something really stupid.  I tried to balance on one foot so I could scratch the back of my calf with the other.

Then, with a “whoop!” I ripped a $100 million painting.  I am the woman who fell into the Picasso.

Now I am a ghost.  For a few days I was one of the most famous women in the world yet no one knew who I was.  I smiled at the boy making my coffee and preaching death to cultural wazoos, placed a quiet phone call to the Met to ensure that a photo of me, splayed on the floor in teal patent leather Louboutins isn’t posted in Museums across the city, and dropped hints to friends that I’d skipped my museum class last Friday.  The museum has been very kind and quiet.  But my classmates know it was me, I know it was me, and by this time Picasso himself must know it was me.  I am a joke, a humourous “there but for the grace of God go I” for people to chuckle and exclaim over.

At a cocktail party the next night I smirked at the Picasso jokes.  I gave the heels to a very thrilled nanny and told my husband that the bruise on my hip was from the pool table.  I compose letters to the fellow who tumbled down the stairs while tying his shoes and broke three irreplaceable vases; Steve Wynn and his errant elbow; or the Sotheby’s employee who shred a Lucien Freud drawing.   “Dear Sir,” I begin, “tell me, have you given up shoelaces or museums?”  I picture him padding around in canvas slip-ons and oversize hats.

The really terrible thing, darling, is that I’ve never really even liked Picasso.

This is a work of fiction.  I am clumsy, but I was not at the Met last Friday.

“When a Grecian Urn Takes a Step Onto the Cosmic Banana Peel” (NYT)

“Woman Collides With a Picasso” (NYT)