ALIX AND POPPY didn’t notice when they left the museum, Alix scurrying, Poppy rambling, down the broad steps toward the sidewalk, that Neva was walking along the other side of Fifth Avenue—beyond the food carts and waiting taxis and the rush of black SUVs and colorful pedestrians—with Roman and Felix. She escorted the two blazered boys through the gorge of buildings on a shadowed side street, turning onto the avenue toward the late-afternoon majesty of the museum and then curving around to stay on the east side of Fifth to deposit Roman at a friend’s apartment for a visit of video warfare and interpersonal victimization, an activity Roman was looking forward to after having been beaten at After-School Chess Club by Felix. Neva and Felix rode up with him in the wood-paneled elevator and left him in the hands of the other boy’s meek nanny and a spiffy male house manager rushing with a vase of flowers from the kitchen into a library. From the far reaches of the foyer you could see the expansive kitchen, at work in which were two cooks, its floor a neon-green laminate. Investment art in shades of orange and electric pink loomed on the walls and a cartoonish, contemporary Japanese sculpture beckoned toward the living room, but Felix and Neva stayed near the front door, bade a brief goodbye to Roman, and lingered just long enough to see him knock off his shoes and join the other boy in a sports jersey (he had changed out of his school uniform already, not having been enrolled in Chess Club), and with sweaty hair happily race down a hallway to where the electronics awaited.
Neva and Felix now enter the museum. Felix takes a drawing class there once a week and Neva usually wanders the galleries while waiting for him. She and the boys have already settled into a routine only a few weeks into the school year. Patrizia is efficient about signing the children up for activities and arranging a full schedule for Neva to execute. But today instead of looking at paintings or pottery or jewel-encrusted headpieces Neva realizes that she has forgotten some of Felix’s art supplies at home and so she rushes back to the apartment to get them for him. She walks briskly up the avenue, the apartment is only a few blocks away, and she enjoys staying on the park side of the street, the full green trees making a canopy above her as if deftly sketched for her to walk beneath.
Under the trees she feels memories dart through her without stopping. Trees, smoke, a dog. She picks up glints of such images all around her and they flash in her brain making sudden connections too brief to comprehend but rushing through her with feeling after feeling. She has the sense of a wild place far back in her past, a welcoming wilderness to which a part of her wishes to return. At the same time she is attuned to the movement of her life speeding forward, onward, under this canopy of trees, toward some goal, gliding, gliding among a million possibilities toward one singular event. She knows that she cannot stop for either one, not the backward past or the uncertain future, knows that she has to keep going, keep soldiering in the present, under these leaves, marching through her memories, bearing her own witness.
She is not going to stop, she will not let anything stop her, and this makes her, underneath the shifting shadows on the sidewalk where nobody is watching her, curl her lips in such a way that she almost appears to be smiling.
That afternoon Steve is home unexpectedly when she enters the apartment. Patrizia is out. Everyone else is out, shopping for the household, doing errands for the household. Even the housekeeper is out purchasing cleaning supplies. Steve is home walking the ruins of the apartment, the new ruins freshly decorated, beautifully appointed, as quiet as the museum, contemporary ruins. Steve and Neva run into each other in a hallway lined with family photographs, all framed in the same kind of frame, an entire wall of witnesses to this encounter. He doesn’t fully explain to her why he is home and she doesn’t explain to him why she has returned alone. He says something about a doctor’s appointment and that he couldn’t go straight back to the office. In the carpeted quiet of the hallway it seems as if Steve is on the verge of doing several things: tracing his fingers along her face, confessing some long-ago sin, asking for forgiveness, telling her that he is dying. But he doesn’t do any of these things. Instead he says: Come, let’s talk for a while in my study. I think I may have some work for you. It might be interesting.
She notices then that she desires him. But she is not attracted to him. They are both suffering, and she is drawn to him. It’s impossible to resist, this current.