We broke eye contact when her shift came to an end. In my peripheral vision I could see the next performer rolling a stepladder out to the center of the wall. I thought, or imagined, that I saw the woman’s expression shift as she acknowledged the end of our interlude—a slight softening, the touch of a sad smile, like a benediction. Then she looked away. Almost involuntarily, I pressed a hand over my heart. I must’ve looked like a school kid pledging allegiance to the flag. But the impulse I resisted was even stranger—I felt I should genuflect, kneel briefly before departing as you would on taking leave of a queen. Instead I just slunk off.
Afterward, I was sitting on a cushioned bench in the next room, collecting myself, when a woman approached me and asked me whether I had been part of the performance. “No,” I said. “You were standing there for at least twenty minutes,” she told me, “totally motionless.” Several people had asked the security guard whether I was part of the exhibit. I could see how they might have thought so—I was the visual opposite of the woman on the wall, overdressed in a double-breasted suit with a pocket handkerchief and glasses. Imagine it: a woman spread naked on the wall, me standing fully dressed on the other side of the boundary, two figures separated by twenty feet of empty space, eyes locked, like an allegory for the impossibility and mystery of human contact.
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In a way, it had been more intimate than whole months-long relationships I’ve had.
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I’d averted my eyes as she’d descended the ladder and been covered in a white coat. It felt oddly wrong to look at her nakedness now that she was off the clock. We might have exchanged a brief, awkward glance as a guard escorted her from the room. Maybe I imagined it. No, I didn’t. But I don’t think either of us wanted to sully the moment with any interaction on the real-world side of the line. To approach her in any way would’ve ruined—worse, missed the point of—that intrinsically bounded, ephemeral connection. I knew I’d probably never see her again, and that I was doomed to remember her for the rest of my life. In a way, it had been more intimate and intense - more real - than whole months-long relationships I’ve had.
Okay look: I know I sound like one of those pathetic schlubs who doesn’t realize (or chooses to ignore) that it’s part of the barmaid’s job to pretend to like him. Or a lonely, overinvested reader who thinks that, because a book seems to speak his own thoughts, he and the author are friends. I understand that it was – in the end - a performance. But I also have to believe that Luminosity takes at least some of its power from the charge of an authentic human connection. The name of the show, after all, was The Artist Is Present. (This, perhaps, is why that postmodern doctrine - the author does not exist - has always been so repellent to me; it’s so desolate, so lonely.) And, as a former barista friend of mine confirms, sometimes your server really does have a crush on you.
Let me also point out, as gently as possible, that everyone is a performer; spouses and lovers might be the most subtle and polished of all. The head resting on the pillow next to yours is ultimately remote and unknowable as life on other worlds. We can’t know for certain what’s behind anyone else’s eyes, or what they’re seeing when they look at us. We never truly touch; all we can ever feel is that spark that leaps across the gap between us. Every time we talk to a friend or look into a loved one’s eyes it’s a gesture of faith, like astronomers beaming signals into interstellar space: we have to believe that someone is out there across the emptiness in the cold glare, someone like ourselves, looking back.
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