Lion's Share Read Online Free

Much heavier than those portfolios would have been. Dead weight.
    At last he stepped aside and let her in, then walked around to the driver’s side. He pushed his way onto the heavily trafficked street the way cabbies did, making the other cars stop and wait for him, while Jana stared out the window, hating this silence. At meetings there was always business to discuss, five or six people with which to make small talk during breaks. Natalie had a talent for small talk. Jana should have remembered how difficult it was for her to relate casually to men; she should have realized she’d be at a loss for words on her own like this.
    The one other time she’d met Ed, at a meeting last month, he’d asked if she were an artist as well as a curator. When she’d told him yes, he’d asked whether her drawings would be included in the exhibition. “I work on paintings, large works,” she’d told him. And Ed had suggested maybe she’d want to do some drawings, since the exhibition was still over a year off. She countered with a brief monologue on the etiquette involved in entering one’s own work in a show one was curating, but felt as if only the plush chairs were listening. Ed also mentioned wanting to see her paintings sometime. He’d probably ask her to “explain” them, she thought, turning her attention to the heavy rush hour traffic.
    She leaned back and tried to relax. The bright sun, reflected off the windows of buildings, made its patterns in her hair. She’d washed it two days ago, so it was all frizzy now, blowing across her forehead, adding to her discomfort. When she’d gone away to camp as a kid, the girls in her bunk were divided into two groups. One group washed their hair on Sundays, the other group on Wednesdays. On Sunday, when Group A washed, she would always claim she’d been put in Group B. When Wednesday came around, she would insist she was in Group A and had just washed. She might have been caught, but she was in the infirmary half the Wednesdays and Sundays anyway. That doctor never seemed to mind, or even notice how dirty her hair was. He’d just lain her there on his cot, not really looking at her … Putting her attention to better use, she wondered if those awful camp memories were part of the reason she never captured her hair in self-portraits.
    Ed rounded the corner onto Prince Street. Jana sat up straight, twirled two fingers through her hair to encourage its ringlet curl, and stiffly uncrossed her legs. Time to become professional again, time to give the gentleman from APL the grand tour of the gallery. Come on, she kept telling herself, put on one of those bright phony smiles you always use for corporate executives and art critics. She’d had a difficult time with that smile, at first—it seemed pretentious, so far from what made art real for her. But she knew it was important, and much as she hated to admit it, she’d become good at it. Pretend Ed’s John Perreault or Peggy Guggenheim, she told herself again. Peggy Guggenheim would have been a cinch. She opened and closed the clasp on her pocketbook, suddenly envious of women who used makeup and had compacts to glance into at times like this.
    Ed found a parking space and she hopped out of the car, accidentally slamming the door. She was fumbling with her keys by the time Ed had gotten the portfolios out of the back. Natalie teased her about weighing her huge pocketbook down with as many keys as a janitor—apparently it wasn’t sexy for women to carry a lot of keys around.
    â€œWelcome to The Paperworks Space, Main Gallery,” she said as she switched on the lights. In her nervousness, she’d momentarily forgotten that Ed had been here for a meeting, shortly after the exhibition was first proposed. “Welcome back, rather,” she corrected herself.
    Taking one of the descriptive brochures from the window ledge, she held it in front of her