by Laurel Brett
My plan was to talk about the myth with Caroline over dinner. I had never been to the Russian Tea Room. My mother wasn’t the type to spend money frivolously, and I had never considered taking a date to such an expensive restaurant. As I walked under the red marquee in front of the building, I was relieved that I’d worn a sport coat that morning, as I did every day if I was going in to school. Being inside the restaurant felt like being in a Russian jewel box. Everything was red. The deep red banquettes curved around tables. I’d heard that there was a huge bear-shaped aquarium one floor up.
I had been seated for only five minutes when Caroline arrived. As she walked toward the table I watched other diners regarding her appreciatively. She wore another little black dress. Her straight black hair was down over her shoulders, and long, dangling gold earrings peeked through. She smiled broadly when she saw me.
“Garrett,” she said, extending her hand to clasp mine.
“You look really well,” I said. “So good to see you. Sit down, please.” She sat near me on the banquette. I could smell her subtle perfume.
She noted that. “Mitsouko,” she said. “I always wear it.”
We ordered vodka tonics and pored over the menu. She ordered the duck, and I ordered the salmon, thinking of Galen’s painting, the warm tones of the salmon on the plate in front of the reclining girl. The prices were as bad as I’d feared, but I had cashed my paycheck before leaving New Paltz, and now that we were sitting there, I decided that expense be damned. We sipped our drinks.
“This is a surprise,” she began. “I thought we had agreed to be just friends. Or have I misunderstood?” For a beautiful woman, Caroline was surprisingly direct.
“No, you haven’t,” I assured her. “I can’t imagine what was wrong with me.”
This time, she didn’t rush in to help carry the conversation. She waited.
“Well, I’m not going to make that mistake tonight,” I said.
She smiled at that. Her eyes were such a light brown that they shone tawny and golden in the soft light of the restaurant. I ordered us a second drink.
We made small talk. I liked her voice for reasons I couldn’t quite place. Something seemed familiar about it. We hadn’t ordered appetizers; the waiter brought our entrees just as she was saying, “I come from Indiana, but my mother was a Russian girl from Pittsburgh. I guess I should feel at home here.”
“And your dad?” I asked.
“Regulation American. From a farming family, but he worked for local government. I’m named for my great-grandmother and my grandmother. Caroline was my father’s grandmother’s name, and Tanya was my mother’s mother. So I’m Caroline Tanya Andrews.”
Just then she took her first bite of duck. The vodkas were working. Something was uncoiling inside me, and I realized that I was having a good time, though my Schrödinger mystery hovered. I had wanted to talk about Daphne, but now I didn’t want to ruin our second date.
We ate our food until Caroline took a breath and said, “I feel like there’s an elephant in the room with us. Do you want to talk about that girl you brought to the gallery and Galen’s painting of her? You ran out of the gallery to find her, didn’t you?”
She was saving me again. I averred that what she said was true. “There are things I want to talk to you about, but this is just so lovely.” I surprised myself by saying, “I wish it could wait till tomorrow.”
“That can be arranged,” she said. Her almond-shaped eyes tilted up as she smiled. She had worn red lipstick that by chance matched the banquettes exactly. Her white skin did make her appear Russian, a woman from northern climes. “Tomorrow just happens to be my day off. You’re free for the summer, right?”
“As free as a bird.”
“So it’s settled.”
I told her about my father, lost in the war. And just a little about Helena. I didn’t mention Amy. I admitted that there hadn’t been anyone serious since then. She told me she’d come east with her high school sweetheart. They both needed to get out of Indiana. He’d gone to Amherst and became an actor. She’d gone to Smith and studied art history. They’d moved in together for a year or two, until he announced that he was gay, and eventually she had drifted to New York, as he had. She hadn’t had anyone serious in her life in the eight years since the break-up.
“It was hard for me to get used to New York after Boston, where we moved after graduation, but now I wouldn’t live anywhere else.” So that was it—the familiar sound of Boston in her voice that she’d picked up living there, the sound of my father.
“Are you a Red Sox or a Yankees fan?” I asked.
“Cubs,” she said. “I’m a masochist.”
We shared some fancy dessert and then exited into the clear summer evening. The silver moon was a waxing crescent, and its bow shape made me think of Artemis the hunter, and Daphne, her acolyte, and the laurel tree she became. “Do you have someplace to stay tonight?” she asked. “Or do you want to stay with me?”
“I haven’t actually made any plans,” I admitted.
“You’re coming home with me,” she said, as she artfully hailed a taxi. “The cab ride’s on me. I live in the Village.” As we clambered into the cab she told the driver, “Forty-nine Barrow Street.”
How was it possible that Caroline lived on my favorite street in New York City? As a grad student at NYU I often wandered over to Barrow Street to walk around. The buildings were mostly old-fashioned redbrick, and the short street felt like a planned square. The biggest building had been built at the beginning of the century as affordable housing for the poor, but now the entire area was very expensive. I couldn’t imagine how Caroline could afford to live there on a gallery income.
I had my answer the minute she unlocked her door. She was saying something about how lucky she had been that this apartment had just fallen into her lap. Her apartment was a twelve-by-twelve-foot square white box with a small bathroom tucked in back. Her kitchen was a hot plate, a mini refrigerator, and a small toaster oven, all stacked on a baker’s rack. I guessed the bathroom sink served as a kitchen sink. There were built-ins all around the room for books, her clock, a few pictures, her jewelry box, and other personal items. She stored her clothes behind a built-in door. She had two chairs and a small settee with a tiny round glass table between them. I didn’t see a bed anywhere. I was about to sit down on one of the small bentwood chairs when she lined them up against the wall. She moved the settee and the table also, so I rose and lined up my chair with the rest of the furniture. The central space of the room was empty, and she walked over to the center of the wall facing the door, pulled on a handle, and pulled down her bed. I didn’t know anyone still used Murphy beds. I was amazed that she did this every day, moving the furniture back and forth. “I like to come home to a living room,” she explained.
This meant there was no couch to sleep on. She didn’t even have floor space I could use. Staying with Caroline meant sleeping in her bed. Once the bed was down there was just room to walk around it to reach the little kitchen wall or bathroom, but not much else. Caroline was smiling. She loved her apartment.
As I was getting my bearings, she slipped out of her dress. She hadn’t been wearing a bra. She was a slender woman, and she stood before me with small, firm breasts and lacy underwear. She walked over to the glass table and dropped her earrings in a colorful blown-glass bowl, and then walked around the bed to where I was standing and started unbuttoning my shirt.
“I can do that,” I said, and as I did, she pulled me onto the bed.
Starlight entered from a row of high windows. She had opened the white shutters, so the night became part of the décor. When my clothes were off she stretched out her arms for them and laid them on the settee.
The bed appointments were pale too. I was lost in a sea of white—the sheets, the walls, and her beautiful white body and long fair limbs. Her skin was cool and smooth as a stone, and we made love in a white blur of desire and delight, neither taking over the other. She came as if sh
e was singing, but then she started to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s not that I’m sad. It’s just that it’s been a long time since anyone went that deep inside me—emotionally, I mean—and the sadness, I guess it just lives buried in me. I didn’t mean to ruin it. It was so lovely.”
I kissed her raven hair and stroked one of her long beautiful arms. “Oh, sweetie. It’s all right. It really is. I know exactly how you feel. It’s been a long time for me too. Nothing is ruined.”
I fell immediately asleep from the heavy meal, the vodkas, and our lovemaking. I awoke to sun streaming through the high windows because Caroline had left the shutters open the night before. I had only to turn my head to see my new beautiful naked woman, long and sultry like a Modigliani, doing the impossible: making scrambled eggs on her baker’s-rack kitchen. She was humming “Good Day Sunshine.” An electric coffee machine and two white mugs were lined up on the lower shelf of the rack.
“Good morning, sleepy head,” she called out. “Use the bathroom and come to breakfast.”
We ate eggs and drank our mugs of coffee sitting cross-legged on the bed. Thankfully the bed was low to the ground because the floor was the only place to put the coffee.
“Now we get dressed and you tell me about Daphne,” she said brightly.
When we were dressed, and the bed was put away, we sat facing each other in the small chairs.
“Ah, where to begin,” I said. I wasn’t ready to share the bizarre, seemingly supernatural aspects of the case. I wanted to keep that to myself. “I want to start with the past paintings of the myth. The ones you talked about when I came to the gallery in June. Are any at the Met?”
“No. I think that they might have some etchings that are not for public viewing. We could see them with my credentials, but I’d need more notice to arrange it. What we could do is go to the Met, go to the gift shop, and find a book with most of the pictures I want to show you. Painting the Daphne-and-Apollo myth was very popular during the baroque period.”
“Why was that?” I asked.
“I guess they were fascinated by the themes of sexuality and escape. They liked the idea of metamorphosis. And also, it was a great challenge to show a girl turning into a tree. I think they might have been competing with each other.”
I found Caroline’s talk about art engaging, yet her information didn’t bring me closer to understanding my Schrödinger girls. Still, it was the only lead I had.
“Okay. But what does the myth have to do with anything? What’s this all about, Garrett?”
I had to tell her something. “You remember the girl in the gallery? You remember her running away when she saw the painting?” I heard myself say. So like the mythic Daphne, my Daphne was running away, except instead of becoming a tree, she had become another Daphne. Perhaps this was metamorphosis in the age of Schrödinger. I did not say this.
I watched Caroline place the details and then answer, “Yes. I remember her and the painting of her.”
“That’s just it. She claims it’s not a painting of her. That she never sat for it. That she doesn’t even know Galen Green.”
“Yeah. I sort of gathered something like that. Do you believe her?”
“I went to see the girl who posed for the picture, and it was still Daphne, but it was a different Daphne. Well, she started as the same Daphne, but she grew into a second Daphne. And she’s the one who sat for the portrait.”
“You’re not making any sense. I can barely follow what you’re saying. Do you mean that you believe people can split apart and become two?”
I sighed and avoided meeting Caroline’s gaze. I did believe it. To my best understanding of the situation, an alternate reality had been born, probably at the Russian Tea Room when Daphne met Galen. I had no idea about the mechanism of that or what happened to the Ur-Daphne at that moment. It was all beyond me. I guess that’s what made me seem crazy, believing in something I had no process to describe. In a way it was like the myth. Just as the nymph’s encounter with Apollo had changed her form, so had Daphne’s encounter with Galen Green. Was I saying that women are shaped by the men they encounter? I hoped not. That seemed a very old-fashioned idea.
My theory was that one Daphne had joined Galen for lunch, one Daphne had either eaten her usual bagged lunch and remained behind, or remained at her own table eating a solitary lunch at the Russian Tea Room, and the third was at a rally. I’d heard something about ideas of alternate realities, but I had no idea of the logistics of things, of where the matter that made a new Daphne might have come from. But I was getting very nuts-and-bolts about a bigger mystery. I also suspected that these realities shouldn’t exist side by side, that I shouldn’t be able to travel so easily between them, but obviously I could. Or it seemed like I could when I was with the different Daphnes. But now I was getting myself confused.
“I’m not sure what I believe, Caroline,” I said, “but something’s going on. I need to find out what it is.”
She nodded. “And the myth? Why are we interested in Ovid?”
“Because Daphne is. She told me that she was named after a myth. I want to know about the myth and the imagery of the myth. Like Galen’s painting, for example.”
“Okay. Fair enough,” she said in a noncommittal way. Then she added, “There’s talk around the gallery that Green has created an entire series of Daphne paintings that capture different moments of the myth. The one we hung is perhaps the least explicit reference. Of course, I haven’t seen any of the others. I’m just going by what I’ve heard. These are all very recent paintings, apparently painted very quickly. Your young friend is quite the muse.”
“I guess he was inspired by her name.”
“And her youth,” she said slyly. “Lots of painters have been inspired by that myth.”
I nodded. Those were the painters I planned to devote the day to.
* * *
On a day off from work, jeans replaced the gallery uniform for Caroline. My jacket was certainly annoying on such a warm day, but I refused her suggestion of leaving it at her apartment. In the museum gift shop, she picked up a big heavy volume that was too expensive for my budget, so we found a spot on the floor hidden by displays and studied many baroque renderings of the myth. The one I liked best showed just one of the nymph’s hands starting to turn into leaves as Apollo almost catches her. I grew tired before Caroline did, and suggested lunch.
We found a table in the cafeteria. She put a salad on my tray, and I had a turkey sandwich. We opted for iced teas.
“So. Learn anything?” she asked.
“Yeah. I learned that you, Caroline Andrews, know a shitload about art.”
“I do. You know, I’ve often thought that the famous Klimt, The Kiss, is an Apollo-Daphne portrait. You’ve seen that, haven’t you? All the gold? Art nouveau?”
I vaguely knew the painting, but I’d have to see it again to understand what she was talking about. She plucked a postcard from her purse and handed it to me. It was Klimt’s The Kiss.
Noticing my surprise, she said with a laugh, “I bought it while you were in the men’s room.”
A tall male figure embraces a small female figure, surrounded by a shower of gold and black. They seem to be leaning toward each other, but I couldn’t see any reference to the myth. This woman wasn’t fleeing.
Then she took the card but tilted it toward me. “Look here,” she pointed. “The man wears a crown of laurel leaves, and the woman’s hair is growing flowers. See here at the bottom of the painting—vines grow up her legs. She’s wearing a floral dress, yes, that’s true, but these vines seem to a have a life of their own. And the woman swoons, maybe in resistance to his advances.”
I could see what she meant, and when I finally looked carefully at the painting my heart leaped. The swooning woman had almost auburn hair, and she was small and delicate, like my Daphne.
“Listening to you talk about art is wonderful,” I murmured, quite shaken.
“Is it helpful
?”
“Maybe.”
“We didn’t talk about Galen Green’s painting.”
“It doesn’t seem to have the elements of the myth in it, except that the girl’s name is Daphne.”
“Perhaps,” Caroline said. “But think about it. The girl is very young. She is being swallowed up by her surroundings. Her table is sprouting green plates and green beans. The vegetable world is approaching.”
“That sounds a bit far-fetched. And anyway, there’s no Apollo in the painting.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “But how about this—maybe Galen is Apollo, watching her, and maybe he has captured her on the canvas.”
I felt a pang when she said this. Had Galen hunted Daphne? Something didn’t quite fit. She had been the huntress at our encounter, not the other way around. But Galen didn’t know that. Or maybe his pursuit was the painter’s eye, an unconscious encroachment.
“And there’s nothing more you can tell me about the girl or your interest in her?”
“Not right now.” I was hesitant to appear too crazy to Caroline right after we’d been to bed together. I didn’t want her closing the door on me already.
She had something else on her mind. “I told Jerry after our last disastrous date that we wouldn’t be seeing each other again—”
“How do you know Jerry?” I cut in. “Did he come into the gallery? You’re just the kind of girl he’d want for himself.”
“I was his patient,” she said, showing some embarrassment for the first time. “We liked each other, sure, but dating is way against the rules. He told me he had a friend for me.”
I didn’t know why, but Jerry’s involvement in our relationship annoyed me. It felt like meddling, even if he had been right that we would make a good pair.