When Caroline got a call from an old boss asking if she was available tomorrow for a gig, she was gratified to tell him that she was simply too busy with a commission.
"For a
museum
", she emphasized.
He was not, as she'd hoped, impressed. In fact he didn't acknowledge it at all, and responded by offering her a slightly higher hourly rate, in cash, under the table.
The last time she worked for him was almost five years ago. So, she figured he was pretty desperate to be calling her up. She demurred, but didn't outright refuse, until he was sputtering with frustration and had doubled her old rate. It had been a fun exercise in negotiation tactics until she thought about her current financial predicament.
It was August. She hadn't sold anything since the sculpture that Margot and Arthur bought in June, and the next installment for her museum piece was going to be paid upon delivery, in the fall.
Her savings were dwindling. Rent was due. She realized that she couldn't reasonably turn down the guaranteed income. She frowned.
The next day at 7:30 AM she found herself on East 88th Street, looking up at the ornate limestone facade of a pre-war apartment building.
Sometimes the business of restoring high-end ornamental plasterwork brought her to fancy buildings in other neighborhoods, but most often the clientele seemed to reside here, on the Upper East Side. Five years ago, her only way of getting into apartment buildings like this had been through this job, as "the help".
The other worker on the job reminded Caroline of herself back then: fresh out of art school, scrounging together a full-time wage between 4 part-time jobs, exhausted, earnest, clueless.
Jett was 23 years old and, like many of their peers, identified as non-binary. Jett had stringy red hair that fell into their eyes in a trendy kind of bowl-cut. Their eyebrows were bleached, and their lanky, rail-thin frame was littered with tiny stick-and-poke tattoos.
The two of them spent the day together mostly in silence, due to the heavy respirators they had to wear on the job. Side by side, they carved painstaking details into freshly plastered crown moldings in the powder room of the duplex apartment.
On their lunch break, Caroline ran out to get an eggplant parmesan sandwich from an upscale supermarket nearby. When she returned and unwrapped it eagerly, she ended up offering half to Jett, who had brought only an apple and had a hollow look to their already angular face. The food enlivened Jett considerably.
Jett began to tell Caroline, in great detail, about their undergraduate thesis project. They spoke in the monotonous art-theory jargon that insecure artists sometimes use to sound intimidating, but Caroline knew it was probably out of insecurity. From the description, Caroline wasn't sure what it was that Jett actually made-- was it a performance? An installation? Until finally they pulled out their phone to show her their instagram. Their work, as it turned out, was taking nude photographs of their similarly androgynous, tattooed, and thin friends. She couldn't see how these related to anything Jett had said, but decided to save the critique for another day.
When Jett finally asked Caroline about her work, she was far more humble than she had been on the phone the day before.
"Right now, I'm working on a marble sculpture."
After the convoluted theorizing about their own work, Caroline was surprised that Jett seemed most curious about the more pragmatic elements of Caroline's work.
"How do you like... afford making work like that?"
"In this case, someone else is paying for the materials, so that helps."
"Who's paying for it?"
"Er, well, it's not a person, it's more.. Of an institution."
"Like a gallery?"
"It's... a small museum, actually."
For the first time that day, Jett smiled. "No cap?"
"No cap," Caroline smiled back.
Jett was looking admiringly at Caroline. "Wow. That's awesome." They paused, but it looked like there was something still on their mind. Caroline tilted her head and raised her eyebrows, but stayed quiet until Jett spoke.
"Can I ask you something though?"
