“She lasted about twenty minutes and then turned around and left,” Amy admits. Dressed in a green and blue warm-up suit that fits her like a glove, and with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Amy looks like a teenager instead of a serious collector of sadomasochistic art.

“My new stepfather thinks I’ve lost my mind. God knows what Daddy would have thought.”

Poor Mr. Gilchrist. A retired factory worker from a paper mill in Pine Bluff who died only a year ago, he must be spinning in the hottest rung of hell for having allowed his only child to desert the South and accept a scholarship at a fancy school on the East Coast. First, his daughter wasted his hard-earned money on an art history degree at Princeton, and now she has the nerve to stain his memory by exhibiting the results on her walls.

“Who was that guy, Mapplethorpe?

Didn’t he do some statue of a man pissing into another guy’s mouth or

something just totally beyond the pale? When is his exhibit getting up here?”

Amy rolls her eyes. I may not be educable.

“I don’t think he’s in my budget for next month.” She reaches over and pats my leg.

“It’s okay for art to make you uncomfortable, even scare you.

It’s how we grow.”

I make a face. She sounds so damn condescending.

I didn’t just swing down out of the trees, and she knows it. On the other hand, if we got married or even lived together, it’d be my place, too. What would Sarah think of this? She’s gotten a lot more liberal in the last year, but this stuff would embarrass her. She thinks Amy is too young for me, anyway.

“I don’t mind a little growth, but I think Mapplethorpe’s stuff would prematurely age me.”

Amy chucks Jessie under her chin.

“I realize now who you named her after.”

I get it. Jesse Helms, the right-wing senator from North Carolina who messed with the federal arts budget.