The Eighth Day Read Free Page B

soon
.
    “Danny?” Caleigh said again. “The mind police want a report from your brain.”
    He opened his eyes. Blinked. “I’ve got a sunburn.”
    “Poor baby!”
    “And I’m all gritty from the sand.”
    “Awww . . .”
    “And I was thinking . . . maybe I’m too old to be a ‘Danny.’ Maybe it’s time I became a ‘Daniel.’ ”
    She thought about it. Frowned. “No. I don’t think so.”
    “I’ll be twenty-six tomorrow.”
    “So? You’re having a birthday. That doesn’t mean you have to change your name.”
    He shifted in the seat. “Let’s not talk about me,” he said, taking Caleigh’s hand in his and bringing it to his mouth. Kissing her fingers, which tasted like salt. “Let’s talk about you.”
    Caleigh giggled. “What about me?”
    “I bet you can’t wait to get home. Short GE. Buy a ton of pork bellies. Put some calls—”
    “You don’t ‘put calls,’ ” she told him.
    “Well, whatever. . . .”
    She sighed and clicked off the radio. “I know you think it’s boring—”
    “But I don’t,” he said. “I think business is probably more interesting than art—I mean, as
a scene
.”
    Caleigh giggled. “You’re just saying that because you have to go to Jake’s opening and suck up to all the gallery owners.”
    He winced but was relieved the cold front seemed to have passed. “Wanna come?”
    She shook her head and sent a sloe-eyed smile in his direction. “Well . . .”
    “So you’d rather wash your hair, watch
Wall Street Week in Review
—”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “No, you didn’t say it, but . . .”
    She laughed. “Same brain.”
    Danny groaned. “Maybe I’ll stay home and wash
my
hair—it’s got enough sand in it.”
    Caleigh shook her head. “You can’t!”
    “ ‘Can’t’ what?”
    “Bail on Jake. And I can’t, either. He’s counting on us. And, anyway, it won’t be that bad.”
    “Yes, it will,” he told her, and let his head fall against the window with a soft
thunk
.

    The opening was at the Petrus Gallery in Georgetown.
    A single room with high ceilings, batteries of track lights, and rosy brick walls, the gallery was in a part of the city that Danny had always found interesting—and even mysterious. This was K Street, Down Under. Half a mile to the east, the street morphed into a canyon of glassy high-rises, housing law firms and NGOs like the Pan American Health Organization. But here, in what used to be a ghetto of freed slaves, it ran for half a dozen blocks beside the Potomac River—and
under
the elevated Whitehurst Freeway.
    From the standpoint of “urban planning,” this stretch of K Street was a disaster. And for Danny, the opening wasn’t any better.
    If he heard the words “coolest July on record” one more time, he swore he’d take off—even if that meant thinning an already emaciated “crowd.” There were only a couple of dozen people, and none of them seemed remotely interested in the monster canvases that hung from the walls. Judging by the accumulating empties in the recycling bins, the gallery’s clientele were there for the free booze, not the paintings.
    A voice to his left insisted that “they didn’t even
start
to keep records until 1918, so it’s really only the coolest since
then
.”
    That’s it,
Danny told himself.
We’re outta here.
Caleigh, trapped in a conversation with Jake’s earnest mom, had been throwing him
let’s go
glances for fifteen minutes. He’d already done his best with the various luminaries in attendance—the
Post’
s critic, the writer from
Flash Art
. There was no reason to stay and he was halfway to Caleigh’s side when a whispery voice cooed in his ear, “Is that
you
, Danny Cray?”
    Lavinia. No one knew exactly how old Lavinia was, but there were photos of her with JFK and Andy Warhol, Peggy Guggenheim and Lou Reed. The doyenne of the D.C. arts scene, she ran the Neon Gallery in Foggy Bottom and the Kunstblitz in Berlin.
    “It is,” he said as he and Lavinia