“Yeah, that could be great.” I grasped for a segue, any segue. “It would be nice to have less uncertainty in my life, particularly as a novelist—”
“Oh,” Margot said, catching sight of someone across the room. “Raf, I have to introduce you to this food critic friend of mine.” She grabbed his arm to lead him off. “Excuse us for a moment, Jillian. And please, get yourself a drink!”
As Margot pulled Raf into the crowd, he caught my eye and mouthed, Sorry. I clenched and unclenched my hands. Okay, I’d find Caroline and introduce myself. I caught sight of her in the corner by the bar, handling some work emergency on her phone. “You have to tell her that we need her statement by the morning,” she said, then turned to the bartender: “No, with an orange peel, not a lemon slice.”
Not an excellent moment to introduce myself, then. I took a champagne flute from one of the handsome men and stood around like I’d been sent back to a middle school formal, scanning the room for other girls who also hadn’t been asked to slow-dance. (I shuddered at the memory of my own middle school formals, which weren’t exactly fun events for a teenager mercilessly mocked by the popular girls for being too gawky, for being unwanted by her father, with a mother too concerned about saving money to pay for new clothes.)
Another woman stood a few feet away, holding still and observing the room. She was tall and intensely pale, almost translucent, with white-blond hair cropped short. It was a pixie cut, technically, but she had nothing of a pixie’s mischief about her. She looked more like she prowled snowy Norwegian woods until she came upon a reindeer and ripped out its heart, her face never changing from its unreadable expression. I knew her somehow, and then I placed her to all the articles I’d read about her this time last year.
Vy Larsson was an experimental mixed-media artist, a millennial Marina Abramovic. Her most attention-getting project to date was an art installation that had premiered about a year ago, inspired by menstrual huts. Vy had become fascinated by an article about how, in some cultures, women and girls continued to be sent away from the rest of the tribe when they were on their periods, made to stay in huts so that they didn’t “contaminate” everyone else. A few years back, a girl in Nepal had died in her menstrual hut because it was so cold, and she’d been sent out there without the proper provisions. She’d been only twelve years old.
After reading about that girl, Vy had decided to “reclaim” menstrual huts, to change them from a place where women were shamed to a place that celebrated women on their periods. The installation consisted of two parts. The outer room, which anyone who had paid the entrance fee could access, featured a series of black-and-white photographs that Vy had taken of menstruating women. Some whirled in the midst of activity, balancing babies and binders of important documents. Others reclined with hot pads on their stomachs. But all of them looked into Vy’s camera with frank, challenging eyes. She’d even gotten a few well-known women to pose for her: a pro tennis player who bloodied her tennis whites, a sex symbol actress smearing blood all over her lusted-after legs.
That part was attention-grabbing, sure, but it wasn’t the part of the installation that dominated the news, and then turned into a scandal. That was the second room. A door led to an inner sanctum, a “hut” containing . . . something. The press releases wouldn’t say what it was. And the only people allowed to enter this inner sanctum were women, nonbinary, or trans people on their periods. (Or at least people with uteri who said they were on their periods. No one was going to ask women to pull out their used tampons to prove anything.) Two young women guarded the door and asked anyone who wanted to go in if they were currently menstruating. Even Vy followed the rules. For a few hours a week, exceptions were made for older women who had already gone through menopause, for women who were pregnant or on forms of birth control that suppressed their cycles, and for transgender women, because Vy didn’t want to discriminate against those who had, as she put it, “felt the weight of oppression.”
For a few weeks, it had been the most intriguing secret in town, with lines down the block. The women who were allowed inside reemerged blissed out, relaxed, a little giggly with their shared knowledge. And then a man had screwed it all up. Some asshole who had worked himself into an outrage over the way Vy’s exhibit discriminated against straight white men showed up at the door claiming to be transgender, insisting that he’d been born a woman but now presented as male. He told the women guarding the door that he was on his period, and that if they didn’t believe him, they were bigots. Once they let him into the inner sanctum, he took a recording on his phone and put it all on Reddit so that anyone could see.
It wasn’t that special, really. Just a room covered in woven rugs and pillows, dark and smoky with incense, with a video installation projected onto all the walls. In the video, women of all shapes and sizes, dressed as various goddesses, danced on the screen, the colors turning vibrant, then fading, then becoming vibrant again. Meanwhile, a series of atonal, beautiful chants played, while “hut guides,” women who Vy had hired to keep an eye on things inside, passed out chocolate and cups of green tea. (People in New York went wild for any kind of free food and drink with their culture.) It was hypnotic, the kind of place where one could get a
