Lots of women in skimpy dresses... what's not to like

Matt had never been to a museum fundraiser before. It wasn't the kind of thing poor kids did. Still, with a couple of hundred dollar stake from Mr. Adams, he'd bought himself a ticket and Tanya dropped him off--she said she'd been to plenty and didn't need one more.

He expected a tea party-style event, with hundred-year-old ladies giggling over the naked breasts in a Titian painting or something. He'd been right about mostly women. And there were a few that looked to be pushing one-hundred. Most of them, though, were in their thirties and forties, with some twenties mixed in. A few had dragged along bored-looking males but most were gathered in all-girl clumps, drinking cheap wine and nibbling on hors d'oeuvres and, quite obviously, checking out the small number of twenty-something males who wandered around with pensive looks on their faces.

A pretty twenty-something woman took his fifty dollar "donation." Noticing his obvious confusion, she whispered, "they're artists. A lot of the girls are artists too, but they're mostly having to bartend or serve the munchies. The guys just wander around looking sexy. Uh, you're not an artist, are you? They normally don't pay."

He shrugged. "You know we all try to be creative. Certainly nothing of mine has made it into a museum like this."

"I know, right. Me neither. I'm Cassy."

"Matt."

"Uh, could you do your flirting on your own time, Miss." A rude fifty-something woman shoved at Matt's back.

"See you around, Cassy," Matt said.

"Right."

Matt wasn't comfortable in big groups. He found it difficult to just walk up to complete strangers who were, for the most part, already engaged in conversation, and butt in. He remembered how hard it had been to start talking to Wendy that first day on the bus and resolved that this was no different.

He took a deep breath, grabbed a soft drink and some sort of chicken/coconut thing on a skewer, and walked up to a little knot of women. "Have you checked out the exhibition yet?" he tried. "I found it a little depressing but supposedly the artist is going for something more sentimental."

"You completely misunderstand the underlying motif," a gray-haired woman who looked to be in her fifties, pontificated. "Obviously the superficial meaning is one of loss--I mean, how could a bunch of dead bodies be anything but that? When you see the flies on those corpses, though, you realize that the artist is portraying the great circle of life. It's an affirmation rather than a surrender."

A couple of women rolled their eyes so Matt figured he could continue with his attack. "I completely do not see it that way," he confessed. "I mean, flies? Flies clearly symbolize chaos... who doesn't remember that Beelzebub was lord of the flies."

The gray-haired women inhaled in anticipation of launching an attack when a cute blonde grabbed one of the young men and pulled him into the group.

"Evelyn thinks your current works represent the circle of lives while this young man, I didn't catch your name, thinks they represent chaos and ****. What did you intend?"

Oh, crap--busted. The actual artist just had to be standing there. For a brief moment, Matt sympathized with all those art-lovers Mr. Adams had described who wanted the artists safely dead. Matt's bullshit was about to be exposed.

"Actually," the artist said, "I was inspired by Guernica. I've been sickened by our ever-lasting wars and wanted to make a statement. When I heard the rumors that people were saying that my work represents the triumph of hope I wanted to vomit. No offense, Evelyn."

"Oh. Well, they say that an artist never really knows what his work means. That's up to the critics."

"Of course, Evelyn." The artist turned to Matt. "And what was your name?"