"You two arre verrhy pretty…vould you like to come to my gallerrhy?"
She handed us a card. On the card was her name and the name of her gallery (which amounted to her name--Ruth Zafrir--with the word "gallery" tacked on). We thanked her, smiled sweetly (as we’re prone to doing), and she vanished into the teeming throng again.
I didn’t think much about it until a few weeks later, when the press release arrived in my dusty mailbox at the paper. The show looked interesting. We decided to go. (Fade to Black as Slackjaw considers the piece of paper in front of him. Fade in the two figures outside the picture window in front of the Ruth Zafrir Gallery. The refection of the Nick’s American Café sign can be seen in the window.)
We stepped through the front door, and the first thing that caught our eye was a forest of --figures. But ‘figures" didn’t seem to be the right word at first. They were like the trunks of great black tree. At the tops of the trees were hands, fluttering as if they wanted to leave the trunks beneath them. Or grasping for something they could never reach.