Free Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement by Grif Stockley Page B

lookalike on the opposite wall. She has a safety pin running through her left nipple.
     
    “What does it make you feel?” she asked me when I saw this particular photo for the first time. Nausea, I whispered, fascinated even as my scrotum tried to retract inside my body. I’m all for having my consciousness raised, but does it have to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job?
    “What does your mother think about this stuff?” I ask tonight. I can’t imagine having friends over for dinner and having them try to pretend they aren’t dying to get home so they can get on the phone and gossip about the horror show on Amy and Gideon’s walls.
    “She lasted about twenty minutes and then turned around and left,” Amy admits. Dressed in a green and blue warm-up suit that fits her like a glove, and with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Amy looks like a teenager instead of a serious collector of sadomasochistic art.
    “My new stepfather thinks I’ve lost my mind. God knows what Daddy would have thought.”
    Poor Mr. Gilchrist. A retired factory worker from a paper mill in Pine Bluff who died only a year ago, he must be spinning in the hottest rung of hell for having allowed his only child to desert the South and accept a scholarship at a fancy school on the East Coast. First, his daughter wasted his hard-earned money on an art history degree at Princeton, and now she has the nerve to stain his memory by exhibiting the results on her walls.
    “Who was that guy, Mapplethorpe?
    Didn’t he do some statue of a man pissing into another guy’s mouth or
    something just totally beyond the pale? When is his exhibit getting up here?”
    Amy rolls her eyes. I may not be educable.
    “I don’t think he’s in my budget for next month.” She reaches over and pats my leg.
    “It’s okay for art to make you uncomfortable, even scare you.
    It’s how we grow.”
    I make a face. She sounds so damn condescending.
    I didn’t just swing down out of the trees, and she knows it. On the other hand, if we got married or even lived together, it’d be my place, too. What would Sarah think of this? She’s gotten a lot more liberal in the last year, but this stuff would embarrass her. She thinks Amy is too young for me, anyway.
    “I don’t mind a little growth, but I think Mapplethorpe’s stuff would prematurely age me.”
    Amy chucks Jessie under her chin.
    “I realize now who you named her after.”
    I get it. Jesse Helms, the right-wing senator from North Carolina who messed with the federal arts budget.
     
    “You artist types claim to be so open-minded,” I point out, “but as soon as somebody disagrees with you about something, you start calling people names.” Hardly role models for us hicks in the boonies.
    “I just get so irritated with the attitude,” Amy lectures, “that art is supposed to be immediately absorbed like some comic book. Do you realize that when somebody goes through a museum the average length of time spent on each exhibit is about eighteen seconds?”
    I nod, more than happy to keep the conversation on this level. Some U.S. Supreme Court justice, hopelessly muddled, endeared himself to future generations of law students by confessing in a written opinion that maybe he didn’t know what obscenity was, but he knew it when he saw it.
    “People know what they like,” I say, knowing I sound hopelessly provincial.
    “They don’t have to study it for a lifetime. You either respond or you don’t.”
    Amy shakes her head. Trying to improve me is irresistible.
    “That’s what you think,” she says earnestly.
    “But it’s like trying to judge a book when you don’t understand half the words.”
    Is Amy like this with her clients? No wonder she isn’t making any money. She is so damn earnest about it.
     
    “It’s over my head is what you mean. I can live with that. But I don’t have to have it in my house.”
    Jessie, sensing she is forgiven, raises her enormous muzzle and gazes at Amy with her big,