“Right now, they’re more concerned about my blood pressure than anything else,” Noonan continued, trying to sound matter-of-fact.
“How high is it?”
“High,” he admitted.
“How high?”
“They gave me a prescription,” he said. “Told me to avoid stress. You were not named specifically but—”
“Here’s what you’ll do if you’re smart,” Hugh said. “Put the money from the show in an account here in the States. The first of each month I’ll send you an allowance. Enough to cover your studio and reasonable expenses.”
“‘Reasonable’ to be defined by you.”
“Well, yeah,” Hugh replied. “I’m the one who knows what it means. And my guy at Chase has been magic lately. Maybe he could suggest some investments.”
“I’ll think about it,” Noonan said, and maybe he would. He was feeling uncharacteristically flexible these days.
Hugh finished his vodka and pushed the glass away. “I should get back,” he said. “Things were winding down at the gallery, and Anne wants to go out to dinner and celebrate. You should come.”
“Okay.”
Hugh, clearly surprised, regarded him suspiciously. “The lady has a certain glow about her today.”
“She sold well, too.”
“True,” Hugh said, “but unless I’m mistaken, and I seldom am, that’s not where this particular glow comes from. And now that I look at you, there’s a modest flush about your own usually pale gills.”
Noonan declined comment, which elicited a wry smile. Sleeping with Anne hadn’t been part of the plan, or wouldn’t have been if he’d had one. They’d been lovers once before, albeit briefly, nearly a decade ago, a pleasant enough interlude. Since both were painters, they never had to explain their odd behavior and rituals to each other, a good thing, though oddly disconcerting, too. He supposed he’d grown used to explaining himself, or failing to, so this had felt like skipping a necessary step in the process. Anyway, it hadn’t lasted. But last night felt different, their love-making unexpectedly moving him. How had Evangeline phrased her question that last time they’d been together? Had their sex spoken to him in any way? He hadn’t known how to answer, or perhaps he’d known how but didn’t want to hurt her feelings, which were raw and jangly. It occurred to him only later that any woman who asked that particular question was implying strongly that it hadn’t “spoken” to her either, at least not above a whisper. Last night with Anne hadn’t been a thunderous, buckle-your-knees event, but it had been sweet and tender. They’d both known what they were about, and at their age—though Anne was nearly a decade younger—maybe sweet, gentle was what you got. Or therapeutic. “Okay,” Anne had said, mostly to herself, as she’d pulled up the sheet afterward. “Now I can do this tomorrow.” By which he understood her to mean the opening. It was an oddly intimate and revealing thing to say, and only a little bit insulting. It suggested trust.
“But for me, you’d have resorted to what? Percodan?”
“Plus a martini.”
“Well,” Noonan said, feeling sleepy and good, “I’m glad to be of service. Should I go back to my room now?” They were, courtesy of Hugh, staying at the same hotel. “If I fall asleep here, you could be treated to one of my night terrors.”
“Not yet. I have a proposal for you,” she said, her tone strangely playful now. “I propose we accept Columbia’s offer.”
Had he mentioned it to her on the flight? He didn’t think so. Hugh, then, the blabbermouth. “We?”
“As in ‘you and I.’ We could share the position.”
“Take the whole thing if you want it.”
“They don’t want me. They want you. But they might accept me if that was the only way they could get you.”
He couldn’t detect any rancor in this remark, which made him wonder what had become of her usual craving for reassurance, her fragile self-worth.
“How would it work? The teaching.”
“I suppose I’d tell them things and you’d correct me.”
“Would we be married?”
“I don’t think so, no,” she said, her turn to be caught off guard.
“Because that’s what you make it sound like.”
“No, I see us as being the subject of endless gossip, sharing the university apartment and all.”
“You’d be taking your life in your hands.” Risking a night with him was one thing, a whole semester another entirely. Unless these freak-outs truly were gone for good.
“I don’t think you’d hurt me, Noonan. Awake or asleep.”
“Why did I think I already had?”
“Oh, that,” she said after a pause, suddenly serious. “Well, I guess I don’t think you would again.”
For some reason he didn’t think so either, but after a long history of disappointing women he’d become accustomed to preparing them for the worst at or near the beginning. “What happens when you come home early some afternoon and find me with some pretty grad student?” Not one of Irwin’s skinny, sallow-skinned, stapled creatures but some buxom beauty he hadn’t met yet.
“What happens if that doesn’t happen?” Anne said playfully. “When you realize the pretty grad student doesn’t want you, or only wants you because you’re famous and can make her career? Or, maybe, when it dawns on you that you don’t want her? That you prefer me instead?”
And the weird, scary part, now, today, in the Soho bar? That she might be right.
Hugh seemed more than a little anxious himself. “Let me think,” he said. “Do I approve of this?”
“Did somebody ask you to sign off?”
“Oh, all right, I guess I do. Just promise me it’s just a sharing-turpentine sort of arrangement, strictly fluids, that you’re not planning to wed the poor woman.”
“Mind your own business. Quit worrying about what I do with my stiff but gentle brush.”
Hugh was already sliding off his stool. “Should I tell our unironic friend to toss you out by eight-thirty? You’re to be at Coco Pazzo by nine.”
“Lovely. Italian food. I don’t get enough of that.”
“Congratulations, Robbie,” Hugh said seriously. “You—”
“Go away. I can always tell when you’re about to get maudlin.”
“Dear God, I was, wasn’t I.” Hugh looked mortified. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He reached into his coat pocket. “This was left for you at the gallery.”
He handed him an envelope addressed to “Bobby” in a small neat hand. Who called him that anymore?
“The woman who left it said she was an old friend of yours. She didn’t quite seem to realize what an unlikely story that was. You may have noticed her, actually. She was with a skinny black girl who had the habit of standing on one foot, like a stork.”
Now that Hugh mentioned it, Noonan did have a vague recollection. They’d looked out of place for a gallery opening, and he’d concluded that she was a teacher or social worker trying to expand the cultural horizons of some inner-city kid. He’d particularly noticed the woman because she’d been staring at him, or seemed to be, from behind her dark glasses. Of course that wasn’t so surprising, given the occasion. People were always pointing out or staring at the artist at an opening. She’d quickly looked away when their eyes met, the trace of a smile on her face. Later, when he was sneaking out, he’d noticed her again, this time talking to Anne, which had surprised him, since he’d thought it was his own work that had interested her. She’d stood for a very long time directly in front of Young Woman at a Window.
The letter was five pages long, but Noonan skipped to the end to verify what he already knew. Though he hadn’t seen it in thirty years, the handwriting hadn’t changed, which was probably why she’d printed his name on the envelope. No wonder she’d stood so long before that painting, as if she were committing its every last detail to memory.
“She was still at the gallery when I came looking for you,” Hugh was saying. “No doubt hoping she could talk you into visi
ting her eighth-grade class in Jamaica Plain. What’s so amusing?”
“You have no idea who she was?”
“Should I?”
“Not really. If I didn’t recognize her—”
“Dear God,” Hugh said, the penny dropping.
DEAR BOBBY, the letter began. He waited until the tavern door closed behind him—“Are you sure you’re all right?” Hugh asked. “Because you look a little—” and then moved over to a table near the stained-glass window, where the light was marginally better, if still a bit on the ghostly side. I hope this letter doesn’t come as too much of a shock. I must admit I had a shock myself earlier today when I saw your face (your father’s face?) staring up at me from a glossy magazine someone had left on the train. I asked myself, what were the odds of someone leaving that particular magazine right where I’d chosen to sit? Of the magazine being folded open to just the right page and your face staring up at me instead of down at the seat? But this is what happens when we turn sixty. Random stars form constellations full of personal meaning. Anyway, on the train I read the article about your new show, opening this very day—another star in the constellation!—and I knew I had to attend, though I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t approach you, because the gallery would be mobbed (it was) and you’d be surrounded by important people (you were). There was little danger of you recognizing me (you didn’t) after forty years. Lou isn’t with me, which is just as well, because he’d have been incapable of restraint. He’d have bragged to everyone in the gallery that you were best friends. Indeed, I wonder if you have any idea how many times in an average week he invokes your name.
That’s part of why I’m writing what started out to be a simple invitation. You must pay us a visit, Bobby, and I hope you’ll bring your lady friend, Anne. I noticed her at the gallery, the way she kept glancing across the room at you, and she noticed me, too, perhaps for the same reason. Women, unlike men, actually notice things. We talked briefly and it was she who procured the paper this is written on (twice going back for more). I liked her a lot, and her paintings, too. Having her accompany you will make a visit easier on Lou, who believes you and I were in love back when and that we might be again. That’s wonderfully sweet, I think. When he looks at me, he sees the girl he married. He’s totally blind, in other words.
But destinies turn on individual moments, do they not? Remember how I came over to Ikey’s the day I learned my mother had been killed? Lou was there in the store, and so were Tessa and Lou-Lou. They all took one look at me and knew something horrible had happened. Lou took me in his arms, and I think right then I must have had an intimation about the rest of my life, that it would be spent at Ikey’s, where it was warm and safe and good. I had no idea you were even there. When you came in from the back room, you were smiling, like maybe you were remembering our one and only kiss the day before, and I remember looking away. Because it came home to me then how wrong I’d been about something I’d believed, or tried to believe, all that year: that I wouldn’t have to choose between you. What I never told you, or anyone until now, was that I looked away for shame. You see, before Ikey’s I’d gone to your place above the drugstore. When I heard about my mother, it was you I wanted to tell, Bobby. I don’t know how long I waited for you there. Long enough to feel like a bad person.
Why am I telling you now? Because, I suppose, it’s finally safe. Because I love my husband and my life. I recently doubted that, but I know now that I was wrong to. Things have worked out for the best, and not just for Lou and me. To look at your paintings is to know that you’ve lived the right life. Your Young Girl made me think of the night you gave me a ride home on your motorcycle. Remember how I waved to you from my bedroom window? But I particularly admired your Bridge of Sighs, which I took to mean you finally made peace with your dad. Such haunted, remorseful eyes you gave him. Your own eyes, if you’ll permit me. Does this mean you’ve forgiven yourself as well?
Did it? Noonan wondered. How could you know? For some reason he thought about Lucy, how he’d wanted him to explain why some people had to pay at the footbridge while others got to cross for free. That’s just the way it is, he’d replied—rather cruelly, it now seemed to him. And not just cruel. Untrue. Because in the end everybody pays.
Not long ago, Sarah continued, Lou asked me if I thought he’d stolen my rightful destiny by marrying me. I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn’t regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, so help me God,” as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don’t even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn’t this why we can’t help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven’t been?
Love, Sarah.
Everybody pays.
“Hey, dickhead!” came the bartender’s voice as Noonan sat staring at the blurred page before him. “No crying in the bar!”
Always a good rule.
IT DIDN’T OCCUR to him until he couldn’t find Albany among the destinations on the big board at Grand Central Terminal that Sarah’s train might be leaving out of Penn Station. Which meant he’d wasted—what, twenty minutes? He’d taken a taxi uptown and now grabbed another, which immediately stalled in crosstown traffic. He used the time to consider how wonderful it was to live in Venice, a city with no cars, and to do the impossible arithmetic of Sarah’s head start. How long had it taken her to compose the letter at the gallery while he was drinking beer in that bar? Did she and her companion—who on earth was the black kid, anyway?—have to check out of a hotel first, or had they gone directly from the gallery to the train station? He assumed, though he wasn’t sure why, that the kid was traveling with her and not just someone she’d met and would leave in the city. Had their timing been good, or would they have to wait forty-five minutes or longer for the next northbound train? There were far too many variables to calculate.
At Penn Station he didn’t see them in the main hall. According to the board, the only train that stopped in Albany was leaving in five minutes, so he noted the track number and dashed off, elbowing his way through the throngs of people. When he found the right track, the train, hissing loudly in anticipation of its departure, looked to have a good dozen cars. “Hurry,” a woman in an Amtrak uniform said when he loped toward her, apparently having concluded he meant to board, which he was tempted to, except there was no particular reason to believe they were on this train. They were just as likely to be on the one that left an hour ago, or the one leaving an hour from now. Anne, who’d still been at the gallery when he returned, had told him that all Sarah had said was they had a train to catch. The thing to do, he decided, was head down to the end of the platform and then start back, checking each lighted car. The black girl, bless her, would make Sarah easier to spot and maybe the departure would be delayed. All he really wanted to do was tell her she wasn’t alone in feeling cheated, even when, as in his case, life had given more and better than he deserved.
But as he reached the end of the platform the train began moving and he peered anxiously into each car as it creaked past, his heart, unused to such physical exertion, thudding in his chest, his breathing shallow now. He’d just about concluded they weren’t aboard when he saw them coming toward him in the next-to-last car. If that was the same black girl from the gallery, and if the dark-haired woman in sunglasses beside her wasn’t just a stranger who happened to be occupying the next seat. What was it Sarah had said about unlikely odds? But it had to be them for all of this foolish commotion to have any meaning, he thought, for the constellation to be a constellation and not just a cluster of random stars.
It was the girl who noticed him waving. Was it a look of recognition she gave him? Did she nudge the woman sitting next to her? Because she looked up from her book at that moment and saw him through the window as the train picked up speed. Did her look of surprise mean she recognized him, or was she simply alarmed tha
t someone was standing so close to the edge of the platform? The Amtrak woman who’d advised him to hurry was now shouting, “Sir! Sir! Step back!” Was it Noonan’s imagination, or did the passenger break into Sarah’s radiant smile in that heartbeat before both the car she was in and the one behind it were gone?
The Amtrak woman had him by the elbow now. “Sir,” she said. “You have to step back. The train’s gone. There’ll be another in an hour. Are you all right?”
Out of breath, Noonan tried to tell her he was fine, but his heart was pounding even harder now, as if it meant to leap out of his chest, and he’d broken into a sweat. In a matter of seconds he was drenched, damned fool that he was, running like this when he hadn’t run in years.
“Sir,” the woman said, “you need to sit down.” She was tugging at him now, but just then he noticed the train across the platform, its doors hissing closed. In the nearest car, a man was looking right at him and grinning nastily. At first Noonan didn’t recognize him as Lichtner, who of course was in Venice. They’d run into each other in San Marco the day before he left for New York. Had he followed him here for some reason? Because that’s who it was.
“Sir,” the woman said firmly. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
“I know that man,” he told her, pointing at Lichtner, but then a strange thing happened. At first he thought Lichtner, not wanting to be seen, had pulled a shade down over the compartment window, but then he realized that the shade had come down over his own left eye. He could still see the man out of his right eye, except he wasn’t grinning anymore and he wasn’t Lichtner either. When that train, too, began to pull away, Noonan became aware of a powerful odor, of something decomposing, pungently, a smell he associated with home and the canals of Venice.
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