“Your Fingernails Are Filthy.”

A massive gloopy painting, greys and oranges and blue splatters. The colors gave her a headache. It looked so thick she wanted to touch it. Actually, her mouth watered, she wanted to eat it. Metallica’s black album throbbed in her ears. Metallica was not a band to listen to casually while getting ready for work. Metallica grabbed her by the throat and jangled her about. She had no body, no limbs, no brain, only eyes.

So it was a complete and unwelcome shock when suddenly a guy stepped right into her view and basically began blabbing right in her face, gesturing; he was communicating purposefully with her. As though they were old friends. This jolted her back to pedestrian life, back into her body, and she resented it. She also couldn’t hear a damn word he was saying because of Metallica. She hated it when people took no notice of the obvious fact that you were wearing a Walkman and started babbling at you regardless.

“Goddammit,” she snapped, and turned off her music. People looked over. “Do I know you?” she demanded of the open-faced guy who had stopped talking, taken aback.

“No, no – you don’t – I just – I don’t know – I was looking at this painting – and I guess I hate it – I could tell you why – but … you seemed so into it – you’re obviously a painter – so I wanted to …. I don’t know. Find out what you saw in it.” The way she had spoken to him suddenly sank in, she could see his face change. It was a delayed reaction; the open door clicked shut. He snapped back, “Jesus, woman. You need to chill out.”

The greys and oranges receded, releasing her from their gooey grip, leaving her in the world of social conventions, of civilization. She was sorry. She came clean.

“I kind of go into a trance when I’m here. I … I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

He remained aloof. Aloofness did not sit well on his features. He muttered, “That’s cool.”

“It’s kinda not cool. I’m a bitch. Sorry. You’re the first person I have actually exchanged words with in two days.”

Suddenly he laughed. A real laugh. “Wow. That’s pretty fucked up.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“When I said ‘That’s cool’, what I meant was ‘That’s cool that you go into a trance in front of a painting’, not ‘That’s cool that you’re a bitch’. I can’t turn off my brain. It’s like I stand here – evaluating everything – ‘Oh. I like that one – Oh, that one is pretentious bullshit.’ So … maybe that’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“How did you know I’m a painter?”

“Your fingernails are filthy.”

This mortified her, so she attacked. “Why do you even come to MOMA if you’re just gonna stand back and judge?”

“Uh …”

Then they stood there, not talking, looking around them vaguely. She cringed with awkwardness, her toes clenched up in her shoes. This was why she didn’t start up conversations with strangers. She didn’t know how to get rid of him. She wanted to put her Walkman back on, and step off the rails.

Following the excruciating pause, the guy said, “Wanna go get some Bloody Marys?”

In later days, this fearless leap of his continued to amaze. What would have happened if he hadn’t invited her out? They would have been dead in the water, obviously. She had been frantic for the encounter to end, even though there was something about his open-face that she liked very much.

Somehow, without knowing how it actually happened, she ended up sitting with him in a small dusty bar nearby for the rest of the morning, drinking spicy Bloody Marys, talking. She told him what she saw in the thick greys and oranges, how she looked at art, how she approached it. He asked her endless questions. He listened to the answers. He was a freelance HTML-programmer, a techie, he had no background in art. He just liked to know what was going on. She talked to him like a person starving for the spoken word. Lack of human contact had made her odd, veiled, wrapped up in her own dream-scape. Ah, to speak, to hear her voice, to watch her words land across the table. The buzz from the Bloody Marys was mellow, soft. They took their time. He had nowhere to be. And neither did she. It was a grey and cold Sunday. He paid for everything. After three hours, he kissed her across the table. He was a gangly messy-haired guy, whose fashion idol appeared to be Kurt Cobain circa 1990, but his kiss was lovely, the epitome of sweetness.

His name was Josh. Her name was Alice.

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