Free The Love of My (Other) Life by Traci L. Slatton Page A

of ugliness,” Guy said. “I will have that skull.” He passed by Brian, blowing dark smoke in his face and sneering in warning.
    “I’m not on board with the ugliness of ugliness,” I said, but affected my most unctuous manner.
    “Tomorrow afternoon,” I called to Guy’s departing back.
    Brian was looking dispiritedly at three teenagers bouldering across Rat Rock, cheering each other on.
    He mused, “Climbers have such fun together. That sport is all about camaraderie. I always wanted to do it.”
    “You have to give me back the skull before tomorrow,” I told him.
    “I never got to learn, though. No time, and other priorities. But I’m glad I spent the time the way I did. I wouldn’t change anything.”
    “Brian, focus!” I snapped. “I need the skull.
    Seriously!”
    He gave me a wan smile, and it was as if most of the fizz had gone out of his internal ginger ale. But as he looked at me, his eyes brightened. “I know.
    Let’s get food and have a picnic, like the people in your drawing.”
    I snorted. “They’re not having a picnic!”
    ● ● ●
    But a little while later, we were. We sat on a bench along the bike path by the Hudson River boat basin, not far from where Mrs. Leibowitz had gone for her ride. It was evening and the sun slanted down over the river, which reflected back streaks of red, orange, and pink. Across the river rose the variegated Jersey skyline, with tall buildings whose lit windows winked at Manhattan.
    I was soon deep in the idea of rendering the whole view as a landscape painting. It would be so breathtaking—I could even give it a Goya-like sadness—it would be beautiful and evocative in the way that nothing at the Frances Gates Gallery even aspired to be. What was wrong with contemporary art that the very principle of beauty had been lost?
    That ugliness had been enthroned? That art had become so constrained into individual expressiveness that no one but the artist who assembled it knew what it meant?
    Didn’t people realize that they were shortchanging themselves by accepting this drek as art?
    “You know what’s weird?” Brian was saying.
    “Weird?” I knew damn well what was weird.
    “Weird is Cliff Bucknell getting millions for crap.
    Weird is Dung Madonna ever getting funded. Annie Sprinkle, for Chrissakes. The junk that passes for art in the Whitney Biennial, that’s weird!” Somehow I had found my way to my feet and was gripping Brian’s arms.
    “Down, girl. Boy, you get triggered easily by that art stuff. I meant weird in terms of parallel worlds.”
    Brian pried off my fingers and maneuvered me firmly back to my seat beside him on the bench.
    “Oh, that. Nothing’s weird. It’s not weird at all, you showing up like a bad virus and claiming to be from a parallel world. Not weird, nope.”
    “Ha ha,” Brian gave me an ironic, sidelong glance. “What’s weird are the differences between here and where I came from. Some are minute.
    Some are huge. But you’re still Tessa, my wife. You are, and yet, you aren’t. It’s a paradox.”
    “You’re not my husband.”
    Brian reached over and took my hand gently.
    “Believe me, I know things about you. You lost your virginity with your brother’s math tutor. You were sixteen, he was twenty-three. You seduced him in the music room when your parents took your brother to soccer.”
    “I tried to seduce him, he said no,” I murmured.
    In my mind, a split-screen opened up. On one half, set in Brian’s imaginary alternate universe, I was sixteen again, all skinny limbs and a big mouth freshly released from braces. I was passionately kissing that math tutor. I could still see how hot he was: burly and dark-haired with clean-cut features that belonged on a movie actor, not on a math nerd. Then I unbuttoned his shirt, and I could almost … almost … feel the juicy triumph of the moment.
    On the other half of the screen of my mind, in the real world as I knew it, I remembered running my hands along the