ALTHOUGH SHE LIVED SEVERAL BLOCKS FROM HARRIS and his mother, she firmly refused to let me give her a ride. It was obvious the engagement would be off in a second if Mrs. Harisse should happen to see her disembarking from a car like mine.
Actually I felt a little better about my chances already. If Mrs. Harisse was worth her salt—and why wouldn’t she be?—it would only be a matter of time before she penetrated Cindy’s disguise. Even demurely dressed she didn’t look much like a New England virgin.
Precisely an hour and a half later I met her at her shop and we spent a pleasant afternoon pricing her newly acquired cowboyana. Then we went to a Chinese restaurant and Cindy put away an amazing amount of shrimp fried rice. I tried to get her interested in scouting by telling her stories about Zack Jenks, the world’s greatest Coke-bottle scout, one of the simplest and most amusing men I knew, but it didn’t work. Cindy wasn’t interested in scouting. She was interested in eating a lot of rice, having a normal amount of sex, and getting her sleep, which is exactly the order in which things occurred.
When I woke up for the second time in her bed she was already up and dressed, ready to bop off for the day to New York to buy some dresses for her dress shop. She looked beautifully organized and also beautiful.
Once she was ready, she came over to the bed and scrutinized me thoughtfully, in the way that she had. She had a newspaper tucked under her arm and an elegant little Fendi briefcase in her lap, all ready to go.
“What are you gonna do all day?” she asked.
“Scout,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, “but don’t go too far away. Just buy things around here. I’ll be back on the four o’clock shuttle.”
I’ve always been a little intimidated by women who wake up early. It may have been why I got along so well with Coffee. Not only did she not wake up early: it could truthfully be said that she was seldom fully awake.
Cindy Sanders was fully awake. “Did you hear me?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said, willing to agree to anything. “I heard you.”
“There’s a party at the Iranian embassy tonight,” she said. “We might go. Check in with me at the shop about five-thirty.”
The minute she went out the door I felt the need to be immersed in my own element again, my element being objects.
Thirty minutes later I was downtown, in the thick of an auction, arriving just in time to buy the best quadripartite icon I had ever seen.