Now, in his office teetering high above Forty-fourth Street, Glass held the phone in a hand that refused to stay steady and tapped out a number. A bright New York voice answered, doing its singsong yes-how-may-I-help-you?
“Alison O’Keeffe,” Glass said. “Is she there? Tell her it’s John-she’ll know.”
He drummed his fingers on the desk and listened to the hollow nothingness on the line. Can there be, he was thinking, any more costly hostage to fortune than a mistress?
4
ALISON
Glass had first met Alison O’Keeffe the previous winter outside a bar in the Village. It was, she was, every middleaged male smoker’s fantasy made flesh. There he stood, huddled in the doorway sucking on a cigarette as flurries of snow played round his ankles, when she came out, scowled at the bruisecolored sky and lit up a Gauloise-a Gauloise, for God’s sake! He assumed from this that she was French, but the longer he looked at her-and he looked at her for so long and with such intensity that he was surprised she did not call a cop-the more convinced he became, on no basis other than tribal instinct, that she must be Irish. She was of middle height, slender, very dark of hair and very pale of skin. The word he could not help applying to her features was chiseled, though they were far from hard-creamy marble, lovingly shaped. Her eyes were an extraordinary shade of deep azure which, as he would come to know, grew even deeper at moments of passion. She smoked now in that faintly impatient, faintly resentful way that women did when they were forced outdoors like this, one arm held stiffly upright, an elbow cupped firmly in a palm, her fingers twiddling the cigarette as if it were a piece of chalk with which she was dashing out a complex formula on an invisible blackboard. She wore a high-necked black sweater and black leather trousers; the trousers he considered a mistake, but one that, on balance, he could forgive.
Afterward he would insist that he was in love with her before they had exchanged their first words.
She paid him no heed, and seemed not to have noticed him there, though they were the only two pariahs in the smokers’ vestibule at that five o’clock hour of the darkling December evening. He had come to the bar to meet the editor of a new, radical journal who wanted him to contribute a piece on the Northern Irish peace agreement for the first issue. The editor was a muscular, fresh-faced, tirelessly smiling young man recently out of Yale, and after two minutes of his pitch Glass knew he was not going to write for him. That kind of sincerity, though he supposed he, too, must have been filled with it, and filled to the brim, back at the dawn of history, now only wearied him. So he would not have been eager to go back into the bar even if this palely lovely girl had not been outside with him, which she most certainly, most excitingly, was. Well, not with him, perhaps, but there, which for the moment was enough. He wondered how he might go about securing her attention. It was odd how perilous it could be in this city to offer a friendly remark to a stranger. Once he had commented on the weather to a girl in a lift, and she had shrunk back from him into a corner and informed him in a tense, low voice that she had a Mace spray in her purse. This one irritably smoking beside him now, in her shiny rawhide pants, looked as if she would be not so antagonistic, though her self-containedness was certainly daunting. But it was Christmas, the time of year most fraught, for him, with erotic possibilities, and he had a panicky sense that at the very next moment this particular possibility was going to stub out her cigarette and thrust herself back into the crowded bar, and that he would never see her again, and so, at last, he spoke.
“I’ve made a bet with myself,” he said.
The young woman looked at him, and seemed not impressed by what she saw. “Pardon me?”
“I’m wagering you’re Irish.” He smiled; it felt, from his side of it, like a leer.
She narrowed her eyes and set her jaw at an angle, weighing him up. “How did you know?” she said.
He was so taken aback at being right that he felt winded for a moment. He laughed breathily. “I don’t know. Are you Irish Irish, or did your granny come from Ireland?”
She was still watching him measuringly. “I’m Irish Irish,” she said. “And as it happens, my grandmother came from New York.” Then she did stub out her cigarette, and pushed open the door of the bar behind her and, throwing him a cold, quick smile, was gone.
Now, in damp April, he was making his way into another bar, again in the Village, with something of the same sense of alarmed anticipation-though for different reasons-that he had felt when he had followed her into the dive on Houston Street that snowy afternoon in Christmas week, determined she would not disappear out of his life. She was standing at the bar, leaning on an elbow, holding a tall glass of something crimson. “What’s up?” she said. “You’re green around the gills.” She was a painter, and she wore a painter’s smock, but although she had been working and had come straight round from her studio on Bleecker Street there was not a spot of spilled paint to be seen anywhere on her person; she was not that kind of painter. She also wore leggings with black and gray horizontal stripes that made him think, incongruously, of Siena Cathedral.
He ordered a dry martini, and Alison arched an eyebrow. “A bit early, isn’t it?” she said. “What’s the matter, has your father-in-law cut you out of his will?”
Glass’s connection with the Mulhollands was for Alison an unfailing invitation for raillery and comic elaboration. She was a humorous girl, with a wayward appreciation of life’s more ridiculous arrangements. What she thought of his marriage to Louise he did not know, for she never said, which was fine by him. She painted big, bold abstracts in bright acrylics, which he did not consider very good. Alison knew what he thought of her work, and did not mind; she was that kind of painter.
He asked her what she was drinking, looking dubiously at the gory stuff in her glass, and she said it was a Virgin Mary. He sipped at his martini. She was waiting for him to tell her what it was that had made him speak to her so urgently, and so cryptically, on the telephone. Patience was one of her more notable qualities, patience, and a peculiar, and sometimes, so he found, unsettling way of becoming suddenly, eerily still, as if she were waiting calmly for something to take place that she had already foreseen.