“Julie.”
Jen was standing in line at the coat check in the red-carpeted, red-walled arcade outside the ballroom where the annual Bluff Foundation Revel was winding down. Meg, her date, was in the ladies’ room. Jen pulled her spangled black-cashmere wrap a bit tighter around her midsection and turned toward the voice to see Leora Infinitas. Structured mosaic-print dress and gladiator spikes. Smoky eye. Caramel-butter extensions. Shoulders thrown back, one hand on waist, hip turned and corresponding leg stepped out. Anxious handler—not Sunny, but Sunny-like in her force field of high-strung cheer, her flat-footed quickness—levitating nearby, BlackBerry in one palm and two handbags in the other.
“Oh, wow, Leora—Ms. Infinitas! Yes—it’s Jen—but that’s okay—what an amazing dress—it’s so nice to finally meet you,” Jen said, holding out her hand.
Leora Infinitas turned both palms upward, the cuffs and clatches encircling her wrists winking with light, in a gesture that Jen couldn’t instantly decode as either a proposal for a hug, an invitation for a double hand grasp, or a dispensation with all tactile formalities. After a second’s hesitation, Jen reached out her hand, knuckles to ceiling, and wrapped her fingers around Leora’s limp right palm in a 90-degrees-turned handshake. The Sunny-like handler checked her watch.
“But we’ve met many times,” Leora Infinitas said, extracting her hand and aiming her head in a quizzical tilt.
“We have?” Jen’s voice squeaked. She felt as if she’d been caught committing a crime, but didn’t know which one.
“Through our work,” Leora said. Her eyes were black and bottomless, a sea seen churning through the pinholes of a painted porcelain mask. “Through the work that we do. Through the work we have done.”
“Oh, of course, but we’ve never spoken—directly—I mean, with each other.”
“But we have.” Leora Infinitas did not break eye contact. She beamed like a hologram. “You have heard me. And I have heard you. I see what you do.”
“Oh, of course. It’s funny, isn’t it? I totally feel that way, too, about you, and it’s so cool to know that it goes both ways, Leora.”
“We’ve got—the thing—” the Sunny-like handler said.
“We have always known each other,” Leora Infinitas said. “We always will. I will always be with you. And you will always be with me.” She turned and glided away, handler scurrying beside her, forever attended to and somehow alone.