CHARLOTTE

The man staring up at Brad and Cece’s building was small and dark and gay.

“Lost?” Charlotte asked.

“There is no number. There is supposed to be a number.”

He had an accent. Spanish. He held out a yellow sheet of paper; it was blue-lined, legal size, carefully folded into thirds: Bradley and Cecelia Aronson, 168 E. 70th St.

“This is them,” Charlotte said, motioning to the black door.

Charlotte walked up the stoop and pressed the top button on the call box. She spoke briefly before the door buzzed and she let herself in. The little man followed. The vestibule was stuffy and filled with Sunday dinner smells.

The man reached out and touched the long narrow scarf Charlotte was wearing. The ribbon of dull brown merino wool was very soft, a good thrift shop find. She was in the habit of winding it around her neck several times. Charlotte still dressed in the same color: the scarf, her coat, her sweater, skirt, tights and shoes, all lighter and darker shades of brown. No makeup. Her hair was the same short blunt cut she had since college.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to offend you. It’s just that the color, all of it,” he gestured, describing her shape with his hand, “is so carefully thought out, so considered to blend in.”

Charlotte glanced down at herself.

“With what?” she said.

“Your hair, your eyes. All the same brown.”

She’d never thought of that. She was suddenly self-conscious.

“Ready for the climb?” she asked.

He looked puzzled.

“It’s a walk up.”

“No lift?”

“I hope there’s nothing wrong with your heart.”

“You know them? The Bradleys?”

She laughed.

“You mean the Aronsons.”

He looked embarrassed.

“I do. And you?” she asked.

“Bradley’s my attorney. I’ve been invited for dinner, to meet a friend of theirs, a photographer whose work might be good for my new gallery.”

“Is that right?” she said, and sprinted up the stairs, leaving him to scale the six floors on his own.

Charlotte was still on the landing when the man summited the sixth floor.

“No warning. You gave me no warning,” she yelled at Cece, who was trying to calm her down.

“Now I see,” he said, struggling to catch his breath. “It’s you. It’s my fault. I pressed Bradley for names. I’m desperate for something fresh. He suggested you . . .”

“He suggested I what?”

Cece tugged at Charlotte’s arm. “Please. Let’s all step out of the hallway before the neighbors start dialing 911.”

Charlotte pulled away and pushed past Cece into the apartment. Once the door was securely closed, Brad made chagrined introductions, “Charlotte Previty . . . Javier Peralta. Javier Peralta . . . Charlotte Depravity.”

Their lives hadn’t turned out the way Charlotte expected. At school they’d lived around each other, considerate, but not close. After graduation she was sure they would drift apart; Cece would become a suburbanite, more interested in becoming a mommy than MoMA. Instead Cece parlayed her low-level job at a publishing house into a prestigious position editing art history books.

And Brad surprised her, too. After a couple of years with a big corporate firm, instead of going for partner, he left with two other lawyers and opened an office to represent people in the arts. She didn’t have a reason to use him. Not yet.

The table was set for five.

“No Zdeněk tonight?” Cece asked.

Charlotte knew they would be disappointed.

“Rehearsals. Crunch time for a new show.”

“Charlotte’s friend Zdeněk is a puppeteer. He’s Czech. His puppets are unlike anything you’ve ever seen,” Cece said, and handed Charlotte and Javier glasses of wine.

Javier looked politely interested, but confused by the sudden leap from the argument in the hallway to Czechoslovakian puppetry.

“The minute they move you forget they’re dolls on strings,” Brad said. He pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. “What’s the new show about?”

“It’s a love story,” Charlotte said. “With a traditional Czech wedding at the end. Vûra marries Vítek. Liba gives her away. Zophie plays cupid, stark naked except for a little pair of wings. She flies around the stage and places the wreath on the bride’s head at the end.”

Cece cleared the extra place setting.

“That sounds sweet,” Cece said. “A wreath of flowers?”

“Not flowers. Rosemary. A Czech tradition. Zdeněk is growing some so he’ll have it fresh for the run of the show. It smells wonderful.”

“Is this a show I could see?” Javier said.

She answered without looking at him.

“Open to the public. Six bucks a head.”

Javier asked her nothing about her pictures that night. They ate their slices of quiche and salads in silence. After they exhausted the conversation about Zdeněk’s puppets, Brad and Cece tried to make small talk. The table was set with their wedding china and silver. The apartment, which was larger than their earlier studio, was warm; the pink peonies on the table were in full bloom by the time Cece served the gateau from Greenberg’s. Over the cake and coffee Javier began to talk.

“In Puerto Rico, every Sunday, families gather for dinner. I miss those meals. When I was a boy, we sometimes went to a restaurant in San Juan. It’s still there in a beautiful old building. The rooms are decorated with huge Plexiglas boxes filled with hundreds of butterflies. They sweep across the walls. When I was a child I thought they were abstract paintings.” He was talking to Charlotte then. “It is one of the places that made me fall in love with art, especially art that appears to be one thing, but turns out to be another.”

At the end of the evening Charlotte asked for a piece of paper. Javier pulled the yellow sheet with Brad and Cece’s address on it out of his pocket and carefully tore off the bottom third. Brad handed her a pen.

She wrote her name and address.

“Tomorrow morning then? Ten o’clock?” he asked.

“Ground floor,” she said. “No stairs.”

She knew from the look on his face when he saw them, even her early prints, two feet by two feet, close up, her face in changing light, but not her face, not really, unadorned, so close he could count her eyelashes. And when she showed him her set-up shots, her magically manufactured worlds, he said he had to have them.

“They’ll be the making of me—and of you,” he said.

Her first show sold out on opening night. Large white vinyl letters spelled PREVITY PORTRAITS across the gallery window. No one suspected they were all her.