FICTION: The Art Dealer

The other night, I was seated at a table at my favorite local Italian restaurant. They asked if I preferred the bar, a masterpiece of modern chic with bottles lit up in neon colors and white granite everywhere. It’s a common enough look, but in the heart of the red rock desert, every touch of modern chic stimulates the mind like a Mondrian. On this late summer evening, I asked for a table—I was here to connect with the crowd, not just be an onlooker.  

What an interesting place they sat me. The conversation I overheard still has me pondering great mysteries.  

“The guy was beastly,” a woman was saying to the man accompanying her at the table next to me. They both seemed to be in their fifties, and they scanned the restaurant constantly with nervous but precise energy, like R2D2.

“Go on,” the man said, curling his spaghetti around his fork onto his spoon. He looked fondly at his food.  

I hate to think about what I missed, but here’s what I have picked up so far from the conversation. The woman has recently attended a party in the Hamptons at the house of an art dealer. New pieces hung everywhere in the house, including the bathrooms. The woman had expected to run into the famous host—she was the guest of one of his friends in Manhattan—but she did not expect him to hold any sway over her hormones. Art excited her, but never men of art, it seemed.