I’m having dinner with him tomorrow. I closed the phone. Stupid, stupid, my forebrain said. But another part of my brain, the old, animal limbic system, sat back on its heels, raised its face to the sun, and crooned. And, unbidden, the underside of my arms remembered the soft swell of her breasts as I turned her in bed, the press of her lips and slick of her tongue, and the car felt as alien as a mother ship.
A truck rumbled by, the driver singing to something on a classic rock station, looking pleased with and in charge of his world.
I shut my windows. Opened them again. Breathed in, deep and slow, and out again, long and slow and steady, using the muscles in my abdomen to force the air out in a steady hiss. In again, for a count of ten. Pause. Out, to ten. In. Out. Then I called Dornan.
It rang and rang. I imagined him looking at my number on his screen and deliberately turning it off. I hung up before his voice mail finished inviting me to leave a message.
IN MY suite I walked naked and dripping from the shower to my laptop, where I searched randomly through Norwegian and English dictionaries. Elske. Elsker. Forelske seg. That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person that manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment. The affection that subsides between lover and sweetheart and is the normal basis of marriage. The animal instinct between the sexes. Liker. To feel attracted to or favorably impressed by. Kjœreste. One who is loved illicitly…
I called Dornan again. This time I left a message.
WE MET for lunch at a bistro on First Avenue. The menu was aggressively French. I chose the soup—lentils and chicken livers, with a Rainier cherry compote—mainly because I couldn’t imagine how it would taste. It also had the sets of ingredients Kick had recommended.
We ate without saying much, and I wiped up the last traces of lentil and cherry with bread. “Good soup.”
“But it’s a shame about the service.”
“Yes.” West Coast hipsters trying to do French attitude.
“Seattle,” he said. “If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes; if you don’t like the service, wait ten minutes.”
It was Kick’s phrasing, Kick’s intonation; she could have been sitting between us. I didn’t know how to begin. How did friends talk about something like this?
The sun spilled right down the center of the avenue as we walked to the gallery. Before I met Julia, I never went to art galleries. When she died, I began to visit them, because they reminded me of her. Now it was merely a habit.
The gallery wasn’t as empty as I’d expected, but there were few enough people that we could move from painting to painting at our own pace. I worked along the right-hand wall, Dornan the left.
The heart-of-pine floor creaked as I walked from picture to picture. Hyperrealist still life in oils. It seemed to glisten, as though coated with glycerine. An American artist. Interesting, but not something I’d want in my house. A series of fuzzy-looking black-and-white lithographs of cityscapes viewed from second-story windows, empty industrial complexes, a stand of silver birches in the snow. None of them worth more than a minute. Two huge abstract French pieces, nine feet by six, of what looked like something between Christmas ornaments and the insides of a clock. Then a woman in a red silk Chinese robe, bending over a guitar, glass beads in her hair. I paused. It was ugly, drenched with hatred—the woman’s face wasn’t deformed, but it made me shudder—but the beads were irresistible; like a child, I wanted to scoop them up and put them in my mouth, and something about the light slanting across the floor intrigued me. I leaned in close. The brushwork was textured and confident. The next was by the same artist, a nude reclining on a couch, her back to the room. It was a twenty-first-century painting in the style of a nineteenth-century Russian or French master, every tassel of the velvet rope hanging from the bedpost, every strand of hair exquisitely rendered, yet the background was curiously abstract. The model’s profile was Asian, but the body was fleshy and Dutch. I went back to the first painting, and the block of text about the artist. Lu Jian Jun. Forty-two. Chinese, winner of several national prizes, now living in San Francisco.
I don’t know how long I stood before the third painting. At some point Dornan came and stood by my shoulder. Neither of us spoke for a while.
A woman in a silk robe leaned back in a chair and looked straight out. She formed a diagonal slash across the square canvas. Behind her was an antique dressing table, with beads piled on the distressed wood. The colors—her face, the robe, the slant of light across the floor, the jewels piled thickly on the dressing table, the table itself, the chair—were all the same palette: pinks, greens, and browns. I had no idea how he had done that. The pigment was brushed, and layered, and slathered—even, here and there, troweled. There were two places where it looked as though he had smeared it so forcefully he had cut through the canvas. But the woman was serene, a Chinese-American Mona Lisa. There was nothing to hint at the time period. It could have been the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or the twenty-first. The woman could have been sixteen or twenty-five. She could have been a prostitute, staring into space after servicing a client, an actress who had just left the stage after a particularly fine performance, a young girl dreaming of her love. A face of many stories, some finished, some beginning.
Antique Dressing Table, 2002.
“She reminds me of Kick,” I said.
“Yes?” he said. “She is beautiful.”
Silence. “Do you like her?”
“Oh, yes, very much.”
“No. Dornan, do you like her?”
He met my gaze. His eyes were very blue. “I like her very much.”
“Will you—” I dropped my gaze, turned back to the painting. “Is it the kind of thing you would buy, do you think?”
“I couldn’t say. It would be a big decision, with many things to weigh carefully. Look now, look at this.” He tapped the price placard. “That’s more than I paid for my house six years ago.”
I struggled on doggedly. “But you like her.”
“I do. Though I wonder if she might look ridiculous on my wall. Maybe she’d be better suited to a glittering palace, to a great and terrible queen whose eyes are as pale as diamonds, who drinks bloodred wine, and trails a cloak of dark glamour.”
I didn’t know what to make of this fey mood. He was the one who was supposed to make conversations easier. “You could change your house.”
“Ah, but maybe I don’t want to change my house. Maybe I like it just as it is. Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. But I’m not sure yet.”
“Maybe you’ll find out tonight.”
“Maybe I will.”
We stared at the painting. So beautiful but so flimsy, just daubs of oil on thin canvas. How did one keep such a fragile thing safe?
I dropped Dornan at his hotel, and then drove around for a while to find a video rental store. I talked to a pimply, concave-chested clerk about movie stunts and all-time best performances, and left with six DVDs, four of them featuring Kick.
I RERAN IN slow motion a scene of Kick dropping from a ninth-story window in what was meant to be London’s financial district but looked more like Chicago. Her face had been digitally erased and replaced by the star’s, but I would have recognized anywhere those shoulders and tight waist, the way she turned like an eel thrown through the air, as though she had all the time in the world.