Lunch

by Karen Moline

  “La dame des règles,” he says. “I like that. It is much the same for me. I can play even if the light is extinguished, but still there always are rules.”

  He sighs, and she nearly sees that flickering look again, although she doesn’t need to, because she has already decided.

  “Please,” he says, “I know my asking is very spontaneous, but I would like this very much to be arranged.”

  “I understand.”

  She goes back to the desk and hands him one of Annette’s cards. He pockets it, still assuming she is the receptionist, or Annette.

  “You may ring me at any time,” he says, shaking her hand, his fingers fine and strong.

  It has stopped raining, and he forgets his umbrella.

  That night she conjures his portrait, conceives it as a living vision, he moving through it, prowling down the corridors of a palace already so deep in her head that she dreams it finished, seeing his face smiling at her in her sleep.

  She had told Annette everything, and Annette makes her call him the next day to put him out of his misery, he disbelieving and grateful.

  “Lunch,” she says. “Friday.”

  “How will I know her?” he wonders.

  “Don’t worry, she knows what you look like,” she says, trying not to laugh. “She is a bit of a fan.”

  His thanks are effusive, embarrassing, and she feels a naughty pang of conscience, for only a moment.

  At lunch he is waiting, sitting stiff and anxious, clearly expecting to be disappointed, the fingers of his right hand trilling a nervous sonata between the fork and the spoon.

  When he sees Olivia, carrying his umbrella, his face falls. It is only the woman from the gallery, come to tell him, no doubt, the regretful news that the artist had changed her mind.

  “She doesn’t want me,” he says when she sits down.

  “Yes, she does.”

  “But she has sent you in her place.”

  “No, she hasn’t.”

  “But—­”

  Olivia smiles. “Please, forgive me,” she says. “I didn’t mean to do that to you. It was terribly rude.”

  He forgives her, of course, he will forgive her anything, and they sit, eating, picking at their food because they are not hungry, they are too busy talking, both sending a silent prayer of thanks to Annette for having the flu, curious, their eyes shining, his a beacon of pleasure when she gives him the number of her studio, the number only a handful have, but he does not yet know that, talking about everything and nothing, wary and delirious, wondering and not caring why, there is always time to wonder why.

  They leave, sharing a taxi to drop him at Brown’s.

  “Call me,” she says when they turn near the hotel. “Call me as soon as the tour’s over.”

  “I will call you before then,” he says, “and I wish it were already over.”

  “It’s better to wait.”

  “Not always.”

  They are staring at each other, flushed, it is time to go, and they don’t understand, they want this moment to linger, it is enchanted. He leans over to kiss her cheek, one, then the other, and then his lips slide to her mouth and he kisses her, hard, with all the passion locked in his soul, and they both pull back as if shocked, their hearts not beating, looking at each other in blank astonishment, and then he gets out and stands watching her as she turns around to wave farewell.

  She counts the days till he gets back.

  “THAT IS a story,” Nick says. “Very romantic. Except that they are rarely together. How long has it been this time?”

  Annette shrugs. “Nearly two months, I should think. But they manage. Olivia goes to see him whenever she can, but she’s quite in demand as well. They’ve entirely overloaded their schedules so they can take a long honeymoon, whenever that is, and it’s making me quite cross, actually, that she’s working so hard. Olivia’s insisting on a long cruise, no telephones, no fax machines, no ­people, no distractions, but it will probably be a year before they can take it, knowing them.”

  Nick smiles. That is all he needs to know. The longer they’ve been apart, the better. “Thank you for telling me,” he says, absolutely sincere, for him an uncommon occurrence. “She is very lucky to have you.”

  “I’m lucky to be here.”

  He picks up her hand, and kisses it. “So am I.”

  Annette would happily do anything he said, if he said it to her then, with the heat of his lips on her flesh, but he has no need to, has never any wish to, because he looks up and Olivia is standing at his shoulder.

  There is a sudden rush, an electric jolt, and she is cursing herself, furious at the deep twinge of proprietorial annoyance when she saw Nick leaning so close to Annette. I should never have come, she silently, vehemently berates herself, this is so ridiculous that I am jealous, he makes me cringe, his smug surety and his big blue eyes, he is such a bastard to women, I know he is, I can feel it, he fucks them and then he fucks them over, why couldn’t I stay away?

  She is as peculiar-­looking as I remembered. A casting director would see her face and, at best, say nice hair but nothing memorable, her features small and even, save for her eyes, her mouth not wide and pouting, her cheekbones too round, yet she possessed an extraordinary quality of animation felt only when she fixed her queer eyes upon you, pondering, alight, the color ever shifting, eyes like the sky before a storm, the same frothy hues of the sea when it was whipped into angry waves during the hurricane that trashed our beach house in Malibu.

  Her hair does not match her coloring, does not belong to the pale splendor of skin that should have been littered with freckles, does not complement the somber pewter of her eyes, it is too darkly red, gleaming chestnut and mahogany and as much like leaves burning crisp in their last indelible glory, and so much of it, long, halfway down her back, a curling mass begging to be brushed, brushed as Olivier, who buries his head in it and begs her not to cut it every time she pushes it off her shoulders in annoyance, brushes it in the evenings. Her hair should have been dark blond, like newmown hay, or dark, blue-­black as ink, to set off that peculiar lightness of her eyes, like ice cubes melting, almost reptilianly opaque when she is stern or flummoxed, as she is now, because she has tried to tell herself she does not want to be anywhere near Nick, and yet here she is.

  She sits down after kissing Annette hello, somber, and we order. Nick has gauged her mood instantly, fearing as much as his ego will let him that any forcefulness might drive her away, and changes the subject, regaling us with stories I’d overheard and told him about the wardrobe mistress and the extras in period costume, wandering ghostlike in the artificial moonlight down the cobblestoned streets of Shoreditch, where they have just started to shoot, appearing to float in and out of banks of fog carefully blown in by grips manning the giant-­size fans.

  Olivia pushes her food around her plate, listening to them talk, distracted. I see her perplexity. She cannot help but wonder why he, who could have anyone he wanted throwing herself at his feet, has chosen her. It doesn’t make sense, and she wants to understand it, why she has allowed herself to be so stunned by the relentless strength of Nick’s libidinous charisma.

  She underestimates it. Nick is the riptide of sex. You’re sucked under before you’ve got a chance to think, and when again you surface you’ve been pulled far out to sea, bobbing and adrift.

  I can’t take my eyes off her, watching her bewilderment as emotions flit unknowingly across her features, kindling her eyes, turning down a corner of her mouth, raising an eyebrow, caressing a lash. I have never seen Nick’s precise effect on a woman’s psyche reflected so clearly back, ever before.

  But then, Nick has never before been entranced by a woman who is real.

  I see Olivia worry that her very presence at this table somehow diminishes her love for Olivier, a love that is calm and steady and does not leave her though they ar
e often apart. I see her curious, challenging herself not to react, to prove herself disinterested even though she is not, to prove that her response to Nick, so sudden and shocking in its uncontrollable fierceness, had been a fluke.

  I see her relax, finally, secure in the understanding that, no matter where her thoughts lead her, she knows she is loved.

  If I told her that Nick, in his own way, is as perplexed by this attraction as she is, she would not believe me.

  She sits there, cool and self-­contained. She has been content with the rules and structure she has imposed on her days, so calmly aware of being alive, of having some purpose. She has a life here in London, although she sometimes longs for the familiar comforts of the homes she knew before, she has work filling her days, work that pleases her, work she loves, work that brings her some small acclaim amid the privacy she craves, work that buys her freedom from worries of mortgages and the cost of brand-­new sable brushes and commissions from ­people she does not want to paint.

  She has a life where ­people like Nick Muncie do not enter, or if they do, in the unlikely circumstance of her painting them, they are as easily dismissive of the woman she really is behind her professional facade as they are dismissed by her.

  They clamor for her portraits, these millionaires craving the exclusive, not to own in pleasure but to gloat over in front of jealous colleagues, and she paints the odd living legend or industrial mogul not for the money but because she saw and was piqued by a hint of the bizarre in them, or the strange quirk of an eyebrow. They blab happily during these sittings, conversation fascinating only to themselves yet absorbed with skillful necessity by Olivia in her concentration, their desultory dronings stunned into speechlessness when they see what Olivia has done to them, not from malicious intent, though it is well deserved, but simply because that is how she sees them, as they are truly: naked, exposed, and shamelessly vulgar. They have been immortalized by the famous Olivia Morgan, and yet when she is finished and the painting shipped off to the mansion where it will hang illuminated in a niche of honor, impressing the same vulgarians who continue to beg, vainly, for her time, she has already forgotten their names.

  “NICK, I have to ask you something,” Olivia says after we order espresso. “Why is it so important for you to be painted?”

  “Not just painted. Painted by you.”

  “By me, then.”

  This is his cue. We have already rehearsed this scene, many times. Nick wanted it perfect: somberly conceived, yet spontaneous. Flawless.

  The amount of thoughtfulness he has decided to invest in this preoccupation with Olivia has my senses on alert. Nick is not known for concern, or plans for seduction more premeditated than the few seconds it took a trembling, docile body to acquiesce. There is some strange need surfacing, something I’d seen fleetingly on his face once before when I caught him reading the dog-­eared copy of The Iliad I’d left by the pool and he grinned up at me with sheepish embarrassment. “It’s the quest thing, isn’t it?” he said.

  It’s the quest thing that has drawn him to Faust, that has brought him here today, though he would deny it.

  It is the magnet turning back on us. I am only surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.

  I don’t like it, but I still can’t take my eyes off Olivia. I should mind more, but I don’t want to, I can’t help myself. I want to trust her as I could never have trusted any Belinda-­like creature before.

  I slide my glance back over to Nick.

  Like every skilled actor he has waited a fraction of a beat before answering. This is the audition of a lifetime, and he’s not about to blow it.

  “I saw a painting you did in Los Angeles,” he says, finally, looking off into the distance as if to conjure it up before him—­which would have been a marvelous feat of recollection, since I was the one who’d seen it, and described it to him before this lunch—­“the portrait that you called The Director. I never forgot how it made me feel, that it was a soul, or in his case more like an absence of soul, made visible, painted and two-­dimensional, and yet alive.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like asking yourself why you breathe.” He sighs. Pause. Perfect. “I want to see how you see me. I want you to make me live.”

  She fixes her gaze upon him, trying with all her strength to maintain the cold blank professional curiosity that darkens her eyes into polished pewter, unaware that the expression in them is still many light-­years from the typical fawning interest Nick has grown to expect from every female who has ever heard his name.

  She wants to know, I feel it. She is the alchemist of looking. Her curiosity is as avid as Nick’s determined will to possess. She wants to know his secrets, she will puncture the hollow shell of his evasiveness, and she is not afraid to ask.

  Their eyes are locked, hers a baffled mixture of blunt denial and inquisitive, subliminal desire, his a silent imploring, desperate to win her over to needs he never thought he’d be able to acknowledge, desperate because losing is not a possibility he allows into his life, desperate because he cannot articulate why this woman attracts him so.

  And in that look it comes to her in a flash, she sees it, she knows what to do, the composition of his portrait, his face, who he would be, the specter of his painting comes alive in her mind’s eye, whooshing in on a breathless rush of his pheromones, the scent of seduction, odorless, as invisible as carbon monoxide and just as poisonous, unknowable yet all-­pervasive, seeping into the chinks of her subconscious mind, and pushing all other thoughts away.

  She opens her eyes and sees him truly, there, only for an instant do they see each other, and she gives in.

  THE RESTAURANT has emptied, slowly, and we are lingering, reluctant. Annette wipes her lips and excuses herself to the ladies’ room and the phone.

  “I dreamed of you,” Nick says to Olivia when there is only me to hear him. “I dreamed that you were at the beach, the ocean near where we used to live, and you were standing on a cliff, your hair loose in the wind, just standing there, staring out to sea.”

  She frowns. “And where were you?”

  “I don’t know. It was just you.”

  “Just me.”

  “Just you. You don’t mind, do you, that I dream of you, Olivia.” He says her name like a kiss. “Little olive.”

  Her frown deepens, she is still fighting him. “Don’t call me that. It makes me sound like a martini.”

  The next day a motorcycle messenger arrives at her studio with a large beribboned box. Inside the soft layers of silken tissue paper lie two martini glasses with stems so thin she marvels that they don’t snap in her fingers. And a jar of olives.

  There is no note. There is no need for a note.

  There is no need because she is standing on a cliff, staring out at the dark illimitable sea, wavering on the brink, ready to fall.

  Chapter 4

  Nick is standing, lounging really, against a pillar, posing. That is easy, he knows exactly what to do. He is happy, elated, able to watch Olivia, he is close enough to catch the faintest whiff of vetiver and hyacinth, she is moving, her hands move, sketching, she looks at him but through him, she sees his face but her gaze does not linger, he is free to watch her and think his wicked thoughts. She is there, and he is free to watch her.

  I am sitting in the corner, watching him watch her.

  Usually, Olivia said, she has very strict rules, not just about whom she paints but how she paints them. The quick lunchtime interrogation when she questions their needs and desires. She hears a tale, she makes them tell it, they think it is innocuous, trivial, nothing of importance. From this secret knowledge the portrait begins its formation, magical, she determines what she will paint, how she will paint them, who they will be, what myth is theirs, the transformation awaiting.

  She is painting Nick as the Minotaur, a beast, yet still human. He is standing
in a maze.

  He stands waiting, a ball of string in his hand.

  I know that normally, no one else is allowed in the studio during a session, although it is large enough for dozens to hide in corners, unobtrusive. Olivia’s living quarters are downstairs, locked to us, although the kitchen and a small bathroom have been built into one side, their doors usually shut to us as well. The studio is white, all white, the only colors her paints, her paintings, her smock smeared with memories of other faces, the only color her hair, gleaming richly red, and the paint freckling her fingers. This used to be a ballroom built specially and detached from the house next door; that is why the ceiling is so high and the room so full of light, Olivia told us, the floor is sprung, it keeps me up. There are cartons of props stacked in neat piles, objets peeping out, gleaming things, white bowls on the floor, brilliant Spanish piano shawls folded to hide the bright richness of their woven threads, pushed back behind the cartons into the shadows. They are meant for draping over the chaise, draped over a woman, her skin like a luscious ripe peach in the light of the studio, a maja reclining. There are several chairs of white-­painted wood, their cushions a splendid white brocade, pulled near a large round table covered with layers of muslin, falling in soft cream piles on the floor. Centered on it is a scruffy wooden tomato basket, filled with clay pots overflowing with white hyacinths. She has staggered the planting, some stalks only just poking through the earth, other buds swelling, others blooming, I can smell them, delicate, delicious, I can see her deft slender hands spreckled with paint, holding the fat dark bulbs, I can see her fingers rounding a hole in the dirt, I can see her pressing down a bulb, covering it, patting it, sprinkling it, grow, she says silently, bloom for me.

  I prefer to sit in the far corner, a book in hand, there only because Olivia asked me to at lunch, her eyes soberly begging. Nick had been waylaid by his fans when Annette was on the phone, leaving us temporarily alone, and me not knowing what to say. She’d smiled at me, then, with no pity, and I felt my heart begin to thump. I could sense her wrestling with the inevitable questions about my face, about Nick and me, wondering how discreetly she could begin to satisfy her curiosity.