Chris has a degree in clay, a few group shows under his belt, and an affinity, as he likes to put it, for the physical resistance of a given act. He and his leather pants are in Texas for the short film festival, where he’s put in work on a piece in the medium of stop-motion time, all of which he tells Darlene while staring at her legs, going so far as to show her traces of clay under his fingernails, robin’s egg blue, as if the whole story were less his life and more an alibi.
Darlene, meanwhile, fans her skirt over her crotch, complaining simultaneously about the heat and about how so many people complain about the heat, the way they do it, whiny, in parody of themselves, smelling like milk gone bad, so many glands, so much oil and insulating fat, so many unnecessary fluids, such completely skewed senses of priorities. She loves the place, she tells Chris, but it just gets so old, year in year out.
A mosquito lands on the back of Chris’s neck. Darlene, envious, whistles through the far edge of her lips, chasing it away. There used to be bears here, she tells him, forests. At least that was something. She raises a finger, makes a circle in the air. Another round appears. The owner, she tells Chris, is family.
As she picks at the label of her beer, she scans the crowd. Two of her sisters are playing pool. Five of her brothers are at the bar. There’s one group of mixed sisters and brothers at a table toward the door, plus a few townies who, by nature of being townies, are tolerated. A handful of single sisters are, like her, chatting up tourists, on the prowl. They look preposterous, patterned off girls in music videos, but it seems to work.
It’s your look, Chris is saying, Egyptian, an Egyptian motif, Cleopatra bangs, eyeliner on your lower lids. Chris does portraits, too, charcoals mainly, and pencil sketches, some work with pastels, preferring nudes, posed as if dead. There’s nothing creepy to it, he tells Darlene. He’d like to do one of her, but again, nothing creepy, just art, a testament to her beauty, if that doesn’t sound corny. Does it sound corny? I mean, he says, you are a beauty, stunning, so gorgeous, incredible really.
She leans her chin against her shoulder and, sticking out her tongue, tastes the salt on the surface of her skin. Egyptian? She says. It predates all that.
Chris sweats when he gets nervous, and it is not a smell Darlene enjoys. He drinks faster, too, taking a hard pull on his bottle, which froths up over his mouth. I mean, he stutters, you’re beautiful, classically, almost dangerous looking. But I like that, he tells her, breathless. I like things just a little bit dark. At this he winks, brushes his knuckles against her knee.
The two things that surprise men the most, in Darlene’s experience, are the feel of her skin, its temperature, and the sensation of their own bodies opening in unexpected ways.