I was vacuuming the downstairs, cleaning up after Friday evening in preparation for what Saturday might bring. I had gotten to the library when Mr. Theo surprised me by coming in.
The woman with him was no surprise—I mean, that he had a woman with him. They had apparently met at the Racquet Club: they carried identical satchels, with handles emergent, and they wore identical Nikes, and they looked identically well-exercised, somewhere between sweaty and aglow. I turned off the vacuum, unplugged it, wrapped the cord around the handle. “I’m finished in here, sir. May I prepare lunch for you and the young lady?”
Mr. Theo was rooting among the letters and invitations on his desk. “No thanks, Gregor. There’s champagne on ice, isn’t there?” I didn’t bother to answer; he knew there was. “But I have a favor to ask,” he said. He’d found what he was looking for.
“Sir?” I attended, vacuum at hand.
He held out an invitation card. “This Jordan Bradshaw, I went to school with him and his family lives out in Connecticut.”
The gallery address was downtown, in SoHo. The date—March thirty-first—was that day’s.
“I’d like you to go to this opening. I ought to know something in case I run into them, or him. So I’ll have some idea of something to say, in case. I can’t go myself because we need a shower”—he smiled at the woman—“or two showers, whatever, before we think about anything else. There’s a guest room, with a bathroom you can use, Clarisse. Turn left at the head of the stairs.”
“I won’t be long,” she promised, and left the room.
“But change first,” Mr. Theo said to me, “into something…less workaday.”
He didn’t need to remind me. “Do you want me to purchase one of the pictures?”
“Good God, no, man. Friendship is one thing, but money’s another. Don’t hurry back. Take the afternoon off, see a movie, go to a museum, whatever you like.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, obtuse. “Will there be two for dinner?”
He was impatient to have me gone, which is why I delayed.
“Forget about dinner. We’ll pick up something and then go on to Kyle’s. You might eat out yourself, for a change.”
He pulled out his wallet, but I shook my head. “Thank you, sir,” I said, and left the room, irritated. Irritated also at being irritated. I thought I had my own goal clear in my own mind. I thought I understood Mr. Theo’s role in my plan. So why should I be irritated when he behaved like himself? I exited the room, vacuum at my side, like a sport satchel with the long hose emergent.
The taxi let me out at Fifth and Twelfth. A walk would clear my head. Peevish, that’s what I’d been. I would, I thought, walk along and give myself a talking to.
But the day was so gently fine that all I could do was savor it, the soft, moist, sunlit air, the puddles on street and sidewalks. A predawn rain had washed the city clean and the mild spring sun hadn’t diminished that good effect. People were smiling, as if it were a holiday. Over Washington Square, clouds still gray with rain moved across a hyacinth sky. Contentment flowed into me—illusory, perhaps, probably, ephemeral for sure, but unquestionably present. I crossed Houston. The afternoon was developing a sense of spaciousness and my spirits rose to the occasion.
The gallery was one of several small shops along a two-block stretch, each a single room behind a storefront window. A bell over the door announced me.
Pictures crowded the walls. A couple of women moved in front of them, as smoothly as if they rode a conveyor belt, talking. A man of about my age sat behind a card table, where a hot plate held two full coffeepots and a plastic tray held paper cups, popsicle sticks, sugar packets, and a bottle of nondairy creamer. The man looked at me furtively; I studied him at leisure—an ordinary man, in jeans and tennis shoes, brown work shirt, brown crew-necked sweater, brown Harris tweed jacket. His hair was thinnish, his eyes bluish, his chin weakish; he wore a wedding ring—an ordinary man, probably a nice man, probably also the artist himself. However they are supposed to look, however they think of themselves as looking, artists have the same luck of the draw in their flesh as the rest of us. Talent is not made visible, after all, whatever talents a man has. Or a woman. This man was seated where the gallery owner or artist would be, and thus was one or the other. I guessed the artist, because nobody who hoped to turn a profit would wear such a rabbity expression.
My smile was unnecessary, so I turned to the exhibit. The hodgepodge effect on the walls required me to mentally isolate each picture from the others, and I concentrated on that. Watercolor. Landscapes with an occasional house or church or street inconsequential to the shape of the earth beneath and its overlay of grass, bush, trees. The events of the sky. Gardens in flower, sometimes with a doorway or gate to one side. I was interested: he achieved an intensity of color with the watercolors that had almost the depth of oils, like Winslow Homer’s Key West paintings. He was worth looking at, this Jordan Bradshaw. Even three winter scenes, although outnumbered by the more picturesque seasons, were done with the same intense palette, a whiteness as heavy as snow.
The women left with a jingle of the bell and I began a slow, solitary, second circuit. If I had attended to it, I would have felt the man’s eyes, like a finger poking at my back or ribs; but the longer I looked, the less could I be distracted from the pictures. The bell over the door rang and I glanced over.
It was her.
I turned my back quickly. The man’s chair scraped, his feet hurried. I heard her voice. “Hello, Jordan.”
I was completely unready. I felt as if I had fallen into icy water. It tasted like fear, like sudden danger.
“Don’t look so surprised. I told you I’d come,” she said.
All of my plans and hopes, lost. I wondered if I could leave without being noticed, if she had noticed me.
“Alexis,” the man said. “Oh Alexis, I’m so glad to see you.”
I took a deep breath. Nothing was lost, necessarily. Nothing was out of control. I was being a fool.
“I came right from class,” Alexis soothed him.
I blew my breath out softly. It was an accident, a lucky chance. It was nothing to do with me. Except to take up the chance.
“How about some coffee? Stay there, I’ll get it—black? Don’t look around yet.”
I turned then, while his back was to the room, and she saw me. Her instinctive smile—ordinary courtesy for a familiar face—faltered into surprise, then pleasure, then dismay. I went over to her. “Don’t disappear,” I asked her. Before she could decide, I hurried on to explain, “Right now, he seems to need your attentions.”
“Yes,” Alexis said.
I was across the room before I understood that she could have been agreeing to anything. It was too late to ask for clarification so I kept my eyes on the paintings.
“Take it, before I spill it.” His voice was low, and if I hadn’t been listening I needn’t have overheard them. “Don’t ask me to walk you around and talk about what I mean by it all. You’d think Chris would know by now how useless I am, but he said I had to be here for the opening. He’ll be in soon, so—And the last show we did here sold out, but you can’t be sure, you can’t count on it, you don’t know how much is just people hoping to get on a bandwagon early. They just rush through, something to do before lunch. They don’t even stop talking, it’s like being the pianist at a bar. Except that man, him, he’s really looking, so it doesn’t matter if he buys. He has a look to him, do you think? A professional gambler, or maybe CIA? Syndicate lawyer? Or the movies. Probably he’s meeting someone and drifted in to kill time.”
“Slow down, Jordan.” There was laughter in her voice. “You’re making me anxious just standing next to you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, miserable.
“It’s only a show. It’s working that matters, you’ve told me that.”
There was a hesitation. I studied the shadow of a tree on a snowy slope.
“You’re right,” Jordan said, and he sounded calmer. “You’re absolutely right.”
I almost turned around at the sound of his voice: like a man who has been kissed to discovery.
“You know,” Alexis said, “what I really want to do is come back when you’re not here. So I can look at what you’ve been doing without having you…”
“Sniveling in your ear?” he suggested.
“If I do that, would you mind?”
But she’d given me her word. At least she had let me think she was giving it.
“Of course not. It can’t be pleasant to have me hanging over your shoulder.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Panting for praise.”
I turned around at the bell. She was going out the door, walking away. Outside, she stopped herself. I turned back to the pictures.
The bell rang again. “I’m just going to walk around once. Quickly. Please ignore me, Jordan.”
Time, I didn’t have enough time to think how to do it right. “Alexis,” I greeted her, my voice low, private. “It’s a lovely name for you, Alexis.”
“How did you know I’d be here?” She spoke as softly as I did but it still felt as if she’d shouldered me out of her way.
I stumbled for balance. “I had no idea. How could I know that?”
“I’m not sure I can believe what you say.”
I gave her a minute to think that over.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I do know I can believe you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Poor Jordan,” she said. “He’d be much happier if he could live on top of some mountain and just send paintings down by mule as he finished them, and never—I said I was sorry.”
Then I looked down into her face, not trying to conceal my pleasure at seeing her. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“You have to admit it’s—”
I interrupted, still speaking softly, feeling the awkwardness of attempting subtle courtship at a whisper. “I’d like to take you to lunch.”
“I can’t. No, that’s not true. But I’m not hungry.”
This was the moment of choice, for both of us. I decided to risk it. Others, I’d gotten no further than two or three meetings with; Alexis was also the first I’d tracked to her home. But I didn’t know how she would react if I pressed the matter, if I refused to accept her excuse, so I took a compromising position. “Then let’s walk back uptown. It’s a beautiful day and maybe you’ll get hungry.”
“I can’t,” she said quickly. “Well, no, yes, I could. And I am hungry, that wasn’t true. All right, I will, I’d like to. Have lunch,” she specified. “With you.”
“Shall I wait for you outside?” I offered. I could afford to be generous.
“Why?”
“Your friend Jordan—”
“Oh, Jordan.” She’d forgotten him. But at that moment four other people entered the gallery and Jordan didn’t even say good-bye to her.
I knew I didn’t dare let it go to my head, that whiff of victory, possibility coming a step closer—a seven-league boot step closer—but I had to let it go to my head, for just a minute. The street and everyone on it, and everything on it, seemed to sparkle. Even the grime sparkled. I couldn’t think of anything to say and neither did she. I hoped I looked the way I wanted to, not the way I felt.
Before the silence could change from companionable to uncomfortable, I found a restaurant that looked right, white tablecloths and fresh flowers. We were seated, we were given menus. She studied hers and I studied her face.
I had no idea what she might be thinking. While we learn ourselves from the inside out, learn to recognize and then know ourselves, we learn others from the outside in. I knew too little about Alexis. Her hair shone, and she wore a pale heather suit over a pale green sweater. She looked dumpy, there was no way around it. Expensive, but dumpy. Her cheeks were flushed, just a little, and I couldn’t guess what that meant. She looked up then. I smiled, an attempt at reassurance. She smiled back uneasily. Her light brown irises were ringed with a black band: candid eyes.
“Let’s just relax and—” I said, at the same time that she spoke, “I think I’m glad you—”
We both fell silent.
“Go ahead.”
“No, you.”
We turned to the waiter with relief. I had ice water; Alexis asked for lemonade.
Another silence.
I didn’t dare end it with the wrong words: a line had been crossed, after which things couldn’t be the same. She had crossed a line she’d drawn. Or, I corrected myself, I had pulled her over it. I knew too little about her, which was a serious impediment. That she could be persuaded I knew, by someone whose will was stubborn; I thought she would always give way to persistence. That she was oddly immature, and she dressed without any sense of style, without any style of her own. That she felt insufficient to the world she lived in, ill at ease in it. That there was money, real money.
“Your friend Jordan is good, isn’t he?” I chose to say.
“I think so,” and she smiled in pleasure for her friend. So she was a nice person, that too. Which would work to my advantage. “Unusual,” she added.
“Unusual?” I thought of his entirely ordinary appearance, and entirely traditional subjects, and wondered how flat and gray the usual she spoke of might be; then I remembered his depth of color and a curious—now that I thought of it—lack of human life in his work. “How so?” I thought I knew what she would answer, but I was wrong.
“People like us, especially if they’re talented, don’t usually fulfill their promise,” she explained. When she wasn’t conscious of herself, her face became expressive, and even attractive—in the sense that it attracted the eye and pleased it. She would never turn heads and she wasn’t what you’d call pretty, but she could be the kind of woman you would look at and think, I’d like to know her.
“People like us?” I asked, hoping to find out what she thought of me.
“You know what I mean, like you and me.” She hesitated. “The leisure class.”
“What does that mean?”
I should have said, What do you mean by that? but it was too late to change my words.
“You must have taken a sociology course.”
“I never went to college.”
That stopped her. “Oh.” And puzzled her, although she didn’t ask me about it. “Then,” and she said it kindly, lest she give offense, the danger of giving offense outweighing any interest in taking offense, “It means people like me, my parents, Jordan—and you too. You do a man of mystery act, but you strike me as the same. Different, but the same too.” She was looking at me; I don’t know what she saw. My guess was that part of my appeal for her was that sense of mystery. I was wary, alert: it would be stupid to underestimate her intelligence. “I think,” she added, doubting her opinion as soon as she’d uttered it.
She went on, almost as if having started a process of thought, she couldn’t stop it. “Ordinary rich people, or not-extraordinary rich people. Inherited, you know, money. It’s a handicap, in its way, money, if you think about it. I think there should be special parking places, marked with dollar signs on them, no, don’t laugh, I’m serious. Sometimes I think I’d like to run away and be nobody so I could be somebody.” She heard her own words and smiled, ruefully; she leaned back again. Wanting me to understand, she had put her elbows on the table and leaned toward me. “But I can’t.”
“Why not?” I knew I should ask something else, talk about something else—maybe take up the proffered topic of money in the abstract, to engage her mind, or go back to Jordan to engage her sympathy—but I wanted to hear why not.
“Oh, my parents—I’m an only child and…it wouldn’t be real anyway, because I’d always know…” She thought about it. “Besides, I’m not sure how I’d do. I’d probably fail. Besides, why should I have to? What’s wrong with being who I am?”
I knew the right response. “I like you just the way you are.”
She refused to let the conversation settle into an easy canter. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Not much,” I agreed, “yet.”
She picked up her fork. I hadn’t even noticed our plates being set before us. “I’m glad you liked Jordan’s work.” She took herself back to a safe topic. “Are you a collector?”
“Not really. More of an appreciator.”
She had nothing to say to that. We had been, briefly, forward and now that was ended. I wasn’t sure how to take us forward again. I opted for flattery, which is cheap but usually an effective approach. “I’m really glad I ran into you.”
She nodded her head, expressionless.
“It was already a good day, and this makes it perfect.”
She didn’t quarrel, didn’t agree, didn’t look at me. Was embarrassed, self-conscious, uncomfortable.
I was losing ground, visibly, but didn’t know in what other direction to flail. “Almost like magic”—floundering glibly—“in answer to a wish—”
Her glance stopped me, like a slap across the face. She was cross, bored and cross, and ashamed. I didn’t blame her. Neither did I blame myself: she wasn’t giving me much help in elevating the conversation. But then, I had much more invested in the success of this lunch than she did.
“You don’t believe in fairy tales,” I remarked, drawing back into safety, hoping to pass my stupidity off as attempted wit.
“Oh, I might believe in them,” she said.
She didn’t need to say what she didn’t believe in.
She said it anyway. “It’s you I’m having trouble believing in.”
It was a moderately humiliating moment, a difficult moment to seem blind to. The only consolation I could offer myself was that this was a personal reaction. If she hadn’t previously thought well of me, I couldn’t have disappointed her, I told myself. I wasn’t much comforted, sitting stiff and wondering if I had to let her insult me, if that was a necessary part of the arrangement. “Maybe because I’m not a fairy tale,” I said, having reached a quarrelsome state myself.
“You can’t be, you’re a real person. Fairy tales have to be apart from reality, distant—” Her whiskey eyes, within their dark rims, looked beyond me as if she had recognized someone in the street. Her smile was unselfconscious, for herself, not for me. “That’s what’s wrong with Into the Woods,” she announced. “I just figured it out.”
I had started to turn around to see who it was, and I halted. “You mean the second act?”
“Because he forced a modern reality into a fairy-tale world. You’ve seen it?”
I’d seen it, with an empty seat beside me. “Yes,” I said.
“Didn’t that time when everyone was going to turn Jack over to the giant’s wife and save their own skins—everybody trying to save themselves, and only the common man had nous, and there’s no heroism and no hope for heroism.”
I knew I should draw her out and be curious about what interested her, but that isn’t what I did. “Twentieth-century cynicism is really only moral relativism. That’s why the first act did work.”
She hadn’t followed me. I admit to being pleased at finding myself a step ahead.
“Because it was purely comic, just a switched point of view.”
“A tale told by an enfant terrible,” she said, smiling.
“Nasty,” I said. If I thought, I’d have held my tongue. I did neither. “You have a nasty streak.”
She waved that problem away, happy, eager. Alexis shook out her mind like some women shake out their hair, to display its bright tumbling qualities, to attract. “Real fairy tales are pretty cynical.”
“Cruel, yes, but I don’t see cynical.”
She dropped Bettelheim on me—Red Riding Hood as learning the difference between the seductive, devouring wolf-man and the protective, well-socialized hunger-man. I listened politely, awaiting my chance to drop Freud on her—Red Riding Hood’s little red cloak the symbol of menstruation and the dangers of sexual maturity. She kicked Freud aside and suggested a Jungian archetype. We had a fine time. I let Alexis do most of the talking, and I didn’t have to fake my interest. Most women are less reluctant to show you their breasts than their minds, and I may know why. Alexis had no such qualms of modesty, or if she had, she had forgotten them in the pleasure of conversation.
“Especially cynical about women,” she finally said. “Think. I mean think.” As if I hadn’t been doing so. “All a girl has to be is beautiful, although being a princess helps a lot. Snow White’s prince doesn’t even care if she’s dead. Maybe he prefers it. As far as he knows, she is dead, and that doesn’t make any difference to him, he falls in love with her anyway. Don’t you think that’s cynical?”
“What are you, a militant feminist?”
“No,” she said, “an economics major.” She laughed then, with a lifting gesture of her chin, enjoying her own mischief. After a hesitation, to decide something, she told me, “I’ve got a doctorate, with a specialty in the economics of developing nations.”
“Were you teaching the course you told Jordan you came from?”
“No, that’s a language course. I’m taking it.”
“Spanish?” Her face told me I was right. “You already have French,” I guessed again. “You’re intelligent,” I said, adding to myself, and rich and unmarried. “But why economics?”
“I thought, you should understand what you have.”
It took me a minute. There was a practicality to the idea, although it wasn’t immediately apparent. “So if you’d been beautiful? You’d have—what? Gone to modeling school? Studied aesthetics?”
Then I heard what I’d said.
And Alexis burst out laughing, a warm, chuckling laugh. I could have leaned across the table and kissed her for that laughter. I didn’t, of course, that would have been going too far. Instead I looked down, to notice that my plate was empty. I had apparently eaten my lunch. “Dessert? Coffee?”
“I have to go. No, I really do.”
“I thought we might walk uptown,” I offered.
“I’d like that, but I really can’t.” She meant both statements and I took her at her word. I was satisfied with my luck, and the use I’d made of it. No need to push it.
I settled the bill and we went back outside. There was too little time before a cab appeared. I held the door open. She hesitated, not getting in. “What is your name?” she asked me.
“Gregor.” I think I kept my voice calm. Resonant, perhaps, but mostly calm.
Mocking herself, she held out her hand. “How do you do, Gregor. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
I let go of the door handle and took her hand. “How do you do, Alexis.” Then we were kissing, I have no idea how: we were already doing it before I’d noticed, until she stepped back, into the cab, and away.
I couldn’t move. I tried to remember the expression on her face—surprise, a little fear too, fear was part of it; it was definitely a mixed facial response I remembered. It was just a kiss, just lips. I wasn’t plummeted into irresistible desire. More to the point, neither was she. It was just a mutual impulse. Her mouth tasted sweet, like the air.
I tried to think clearly, while memory was fresh. It wasn’t an experienced kiss and not one she’d anticipated or maneuvered. I didn’t know if I’d bent down or if she’d raised her face. We were shaking hands and then kissing; whatever time had separated the events was lost. I was just as surprised as she was. But I wasn’t afraid. Or not afraid of the kiss and what it might mean.