CHARLOTTE

Mid-afternoon. The living room was dark. Someone had closed the curtains. Charlotte never paid much attention to them before. They were always open, the tall room always flooded with light. Enormous windows looked out over Central Park. The colors were what the interior designer probably called jewel tones: emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz. There were broad stripes of color on the sofas and chairs, curlicue patterns on the rugs covering the parquet floor, walls glazed dark red.

Such a formal room, over-dressed with curtains thick enough to block the light, casting the space into gloom. Along the bottom were appliqués cut in the shapes of different sizes of French curves. Martin liked to say it was all a bit much.

There was a sound of rustling paper, which made Charlotte jump. She hadn’t seen Luca sitting there. The silence made him look smaller than he actually was. In the months since they moved in with Martin she’d gotten to know him. They’d eaten together, and laughed together. She’d brought him to her studio and let him sift through her prints, admiring how astute he was, how sharp-eyed. They’d had late-night discussions about art, sipping frozen shots of limoncello he made from vodka and the lemons Javier’s family grew and sent up from Puerto Rico.

“You scared me,” Charlotte said.

Luca didn’t reply.

“Why are you home so early? Why are you sitting in the dark? Why are you sitting at all?”

He lifted an envelope from his lap and held it out to her. When she reached for it, a news clipping spiraled to the floor.

Randall Asbury—Banker, Youth Leader

“I don’t get it. Who was he to you?”

Luca told her. When he was finished Charlotte said, “I don’t know whether to say sorry, or, Thank God.”

“I don’t know who sent it. Maybe one of my mother’s neighbors. Who knows? My mother thought he was such a nice a man. A father figure for her fatherless boy,” he said, with a mirthless laugh.

“Some father.”

Luca stood and walked over to the windows. One by one, he pulled the curtains open. The light was too bright. They squinted into the view of the park, burned out like an overexposed photographic print, and waited for their eyes to adjust.

“The funeral is on Saturday,” Luca said.

“Maybe you should fly out there. It might give you some closure to see him—you know—dead.”

“Maybe?” he said.

His voice fell flat.

“Maybe you could come with me. We could play act for the mourners. Mr. and Mrs. Carrelli. It might be fun.”

“Not fun,” she said.

He balled up the envelope. “No. You’re right. Definitely not fun.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Martin said, shaking his head. “You’ve just gotten back on your feet. You have a future here. Why dredge all that up again?”

“I wasn’t alone,” Luca said. “There were others.”

Martin said, “Oh,” and looked bleak.

“What others?” Charlotte said.

“Other boys . . .”

Martin interrupted him.

“What good will it do?”

It was obvious Martin was appalled. That he thought even discussing such things was in poor taste. And, Charlotte wondered, according to the obituary there was a wife, a son and a daughter. How much did they know? How could they not have known? And Luca’s mother? What about his mother?

Charlotte argued with herself.

“Are you kidding?”

“It’s important for him to go.”

“Let the sleeping dogs lie.”

“Not a good idea.”

“So, in other words, you think maybe . . .”

“What I think is that creep raped him.”

“Or worse.”

“When are you going to drop that bomb on him?”

“I’m not. It’s obvious.”

“What if he can’t handle it?”

“The whole world would stop turning if we waited for answers to what ifs before we did the right thing.”

In the end Martin relented, called his travel agent and booked two first class tickets to Los Angeles.

Charlotte opened one of her bureau drawers and reached in to pick out clothes for the trip. She needed shirts, and pants, and a dress. There was just one hanging in the closet: a shapeless brown linen sack she saved for art openings. Luca stood in the doorway.

“How much money do you have?” he asked.

Charlotte sniffed.

“That’s a really personal question.”

Luca walked in and sat down on the corner of her bed.

“I don’t mean how much money do you have altogether. I mean how much do you have on hand. You’re going to need some clothes. And that hair. We need to do something about your hair.”

“Wait a minute. I agreed to go. Nobody said anything about clothes and hair.”

“If we’re going to do this, we have to do it right. If I show up looking the way I do with you looking the way you do, no one will believe we’re a couple. Just think of it as a costume. You’re used to wearing costumes. But it’s going to cost.”

Charlotte assumed she had at least a few hundred in the bank account she used to pay her basic bills. Brad took care of everything else. When her pictures started to sell, he represented her, reviewed her contract with Javier’s gallery, and selected a financial planner to invest her income. He kept trying to get her to meet with the planner. She kept putting it off. She lived simply, she didn’t need much, but Luca’s question made her curious. Her work always sold. Some of her images had been licensed for commercial deals. She signed papers at the gallery from time to time, but didn’t pay much attention to them. She called Brad. When he gave her the number she was shocked. So much. Could she really have made that much? Brad assured her she had.

She turned back to Luca and said, “Let’s go shopping.”

In the taxi Charlotte fought the urge to bolt. All of her childhood fears came back in a rush. There would be people fussing over her, fitting clothes to her, picking at her hair. Luca sensed her unease.

“Relax. I’m not your mother. I’ll be gentle.”

“Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not. You’re mocking yourself.”

“What do you know about it? Look at you. You started out a swan; you skipped the ugly duckling stage completely. I started out an ugly duckling and stayed one.”

“What about the other side of you, the side that dresses up for . . .” he lifted his chin and struck a model’s pose, “. . . the sake of art. Somewhere between the caterpillar and the butterfly is Charlotte.”

“You don’t understand.” Charlotte’s cheeks burned, remembering how her mother used to look at her. “How could you?”

“You think it’s been easy looking like me? What good has it done me? I’m thirty-four. Martin and Javier refer to me as ‘that boy.’ You think I don’t hear them?”

Charlotte couldn’t answer. She indulged in that sort of deprecating humor from time to time, and, God knows, enough self-deprecating humor. All the gay men she knew called each other ‘boy.’ They pranced and flounced and made fun of themselves and each other. She never thought of it as a form of disrespect. It was funny until recently, when so many of them were sick. The epidemic had reached plague proportions. Haze, whose death Martin reported to the papers as the result of a rare brain disease, was just the tip of the iceberg.

In the hair salon at Bendel’s, Luca supervised the coloring and the cut.

“Don’t over-tease it,” Luca told the stylist. “I want classy, not club kid.”

Charlotte’s hair was thick and straight; when the stylist was through, her bland bowl cut had been transformed into a dark auburn helmet, longer on top, tapering in close to her head. The manicurist cut, filed, and shaped her nails. Because they were already short and blunt, she squared them off and Frenched the tips. The cosmetician lifted her chin and surveyed Charlotte’s face.

“Subtle,” Luca said. “I want it subtle. Except for the lips.”

“Your lady,” the cosmetician said, in an accent Charlotte recognized as Eastern European, “has lovely skin. Very fine.”

The woman was in her fifties, heavy, beautifully groomed. Her hand was soft on Charlotte’s cheek, tender. Charlotte couldn’t remember anyone looking at her face with that kind of admiration before.

A few swipes of sheer foundation. Some powder. A bit of blush. A little gray shadow over the eyes. Smoky liner. A single coat of mascara on her eyelashes. And even though Charlotte resisted, she outlined her lips, then filled them in, dark red. When she handed Charlotte the mirror she was afraid to look. When she did, the face in the mirror was still Charlotte Previty, her self was still in that face, enhanced, not the way she tortured her face for her photos, a subtle shift, just as Luca had directed. And for the first time she noticed there were flecks of yellow in her eyes, just like her mother’s.