Anne Rothman Hicks & Ken Hicks Praise Her, Praise Diana (v5.0)

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.“Someone has to.”“Well my best friend doesn’t.” Ellen wore a navy blue sweatshirt that somewhat disguised the bulk of her upper body, along with a pair of powder blue tights and a short distressed denim skirt to emphasize her relatively thin legs.Her body shape had plagued her teenage years with diet after unavailing diet until she discovered that there were men out there—quite a few, actually—who liked a woman with her shape.During college, increasingly comfortable with her self-image as a kind of earth mother, she’d had her fare share of sexual adventures and even spent one long, lazy, summer on a commune in a remote section of New York State.All of that ended in grad school when she met her future husband, and now at age 37 she was earth mother to a pair of eight-year-old twin boys and a four-year old girl.She didn’t miss that phase of her life and rarely thought about it.The entire topic was not one she had ever mentioned to Thomas, although she had never deliberately concealed anything.“I don’t know why I bother talking to you about him,” Ellen said.“Because I tell you what you should hear, not what you want to hear.You’re picking a fight over something stupid and maybe threatening your marriage over it.Listen to the wise old head, Ellen.”Ellen laughed.“Wise old head? Now there’s a crock.”Ari was a few years over forty (not even Ellen got the true birth date), but she was slim and trim from the tip of her delicately featured face to her size six shoes and looked to be in her mid-thirties.So far, she’d been married three times to husbands who’d each had the good grace to leave her a sizable sum of money and property when they died or moved on to others.She never begrudged them, so long as their generosity extended to her bank account.She ran her own boutique public relations firm “to keep busy,” although she did not need the money.Her hair was a wonderful red applied by the best colorist on the Upper East Side.This, along with Ari’s matchstick-like figure dressed in a perfectly fitting designer rag, caused Ellen an involuntary pang of jealousy every time she looked in her direction.“Don’t sass your elders,” Ari said with a smile.They were standing together in the gallery, a large rectangular room on the second floor with a row of evenly spaced, tall, thin windows looking onto the street side.A partition ran down the center to increase the wall space.The photographs were spread around the gallery’s interior, propped against the bare white walls.The two women stood near the entrance, arms folded across their chests, focusing for the moment on which images they most wanted to be seen first upon entering.Ellen walked over and switched the positions of two pictures and came back to Ari again.“How does that look now?”“Nice.But if you separated them by another inch, I think they would be even better.” She paused.“And all I’m saying, Ellie, is that Thomas is right when he says that a business is supposed to make money.”“I want to make money, and I will make money,” Ellen replied with a frown.She walked back over to adjust the photographs as Ari had suggested.She had never intended moneymaking to be the be-all and end-all of her life, but Ari (bless her heart) was not the right one with whom to argue that point.Nor had Ellen confided just how close she was to divorce, or why.“I just need a little time.And a nice big boost from this WPW show.”“Well, I hope you get it.Word of mouth has been good so far.We’ve got a good crowd coming for the opening, and I’m expecting several members of the media.Once it’s in the papers, we’ll be attracting crowds for two weeks, I think.Lots of people will have heard of and visited the Iphigenia Gallery by the time the exhibit is over.”“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Ellen said.“Tommy has been pushing pretty hard lately to close this place down.‘Do you know what kind of rent we could get for this place, Ellie?’ he says to me.” Ellen adopted a flat nasal voice that approximated her husband’s slight Cleveland accent.“‘We could use the income stream to buy more properties.I’m telling you Ellie, if you would start doing the bookkeeping and get involved with the rentals, we would have enough properties in fifteen years to retire to a monster beach house in the Islands.’”“You got something against the Islands, Mon?” Ari asked dryly.“I don’t know.I just don’t think I could stand my life if I didn’t have this gallery.”Ari smiled.“You lived without it for most of your life.”“I know that, Ari.But it was always my dream, and now that it’s in my grasp, I can’t let it go.Since I was a girl, I’ve loved art.I can’t make any that’s worth a damn.But I love everything about it—the artists, the buyers, the museums, and the history, even the smells of the studios where artists work.I quit work when the twins were born, but I always thought I would return to that world, with my own place.So, I don’t want to retire.And I can’t stand the thought of being a bookkeeper or a landlord.”The doorbell rang for the entrance downstairs.Ellen took a step over to the intercom and buzzed the door open without checking who it was.“Are you expecting someone?” Ari asked.“It’s probably Maggie.She said she would stop by to help this afternoon.”“Excellent.I haven’t seen Maggie for a while.Has she entered a self-portrait?”“Not yet, but she said she would before the opening next Thursday.”Ari cocked her head to one side.“Maybe I can use that to drum up some more media interest.Did you see that story she wrote for The Portal this week?”“Yes.It was almost as big of a turn-on as her first book—until the knife appeared.”“Well, here’s the interesting part.The police found a man early today [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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