God, it feels good to be wanted.
Everywhere he goes, he can feel the ripple, the attention shifting toward him. Henry leans into the attention, the smiles, the warmth, the light. For the first time he truly understands the concept of being drunk with power.
It’s like setting down a heavy weight long after your arms have gotten tired. There’s this sudden, sweeping lightness, like air in your chest, like sunlight after rain.
It feels good to be the user instead of the used.
To be the one who gets instead of the one who loses. It feels good. It shouldn’t, he knows, but it does.
He stands in line at the Roast, desperately needing coffee.
The last few days have been a blur, late nights giving way to strange mornings, every moment fueled by the heady pleasure of being wanted, of knowing that whatever they see, it’s good, it’s great, it’s perfect.
He’s perfect.
And it’s not just the straightforward gravity of lust, not always. People drift toward him now, every one of them pulled into his orbit, but the why is always different. Sometimes it’s just simple desire, but other times it’s more nuanced. Sometimes it’s an obvious need, and other times, he can’t guess what they see when they look at him.
That’s the only unsettling part, really—their eyes. The fog that winds through them, thickening to frost, to ice. A constant reminder that this new life isn’t exactly normal, isn’t entirely real.
But it’s enough. “Next!”
He steps forward, and looks up, and sees Vanessa. “Oh, hi,” he says.
“You didn’t call.”
But she doesn’t sound angry, or annoyed. If anything, she sounds too bright, teasing, but it’s the kind of teasing used to cover up embarrassment. He should know—he’s used that tone a dozen times to hide his own hurt.
“I’m sorry,” he says, blushing. “I wasn’t sure if I should.”
Vanessa smiles slyly. “Was the whole name and number thing too subtle?”
Henry laughs, and hands his cell across the counter. “Call me,” he says, and she taps her number in, and hits Call. “There,” says Henry, taking back the phone, “now I have no excuse.”
He feels like an idiot, even as he says it, like a kid reciting movie lines, but Vanessa only blushes, and bites her bottom lip, and he wonders what would happen if he told her to go out with him, right then, if she would take off her apron and duck beneath the counter, but he doesn’t try it, just says, “I’ll call.”
And she says, “You better.”
Henry smiles, turns to go. He’s almost to the door when he hears his name.
“Mr. Strauss.”
Henry’s stomach drops. He knows the voice, can picture the older man’s tweed jacket, his salt-and-pepper hair, the look of disappointment on his face as he advised Henry to step away from the department, the school, and try to figure out where his passion was, because it clearly wasn’t there.
Henry tries to muster a smile, feels himself falling short.
“Dean Melrose,” he says, turning to face the man who pushed him off the road.
And there he is, flesh and bone and tweed. But instead of the contempt Henry got so used to seeing, the dean looks pleased. A smile splits his trim gray beard.
“What a lucky turn,” he says. “You’re just the man I wanted to see.”
Henry has a hard time believing that, until he notices the pale smoke twisting through the man’s eyes. And he knows he should be polite, but what he wants to do is tell the dean to go fuck himself, so he splits the difference and simply asks, “Why?”
“There’s a position opening in the theology school, and I think you’d be perfect for it.”
Henry almost laughs. “You’ve got to be kidding.” “Not at all.”
“I never finished my PhD. You failed me.” The dean holds up a finger. “I didn’t fail you.”
Henry bristles. “You threatened to, if I didn’t leave.”
“I know,” he says, looking genuinely sorry. “I was wrong.”
Three words he’s sure this man has never said. Henry wants to savor them, but he can’t.
“No,” he says, “you were right. It wasn’t a good fit. I wasn’t happy there.
And I have no desire to go back.”
It’s a lie. He misses the structure, misses the path, misses the purpose.
And maybe it wasn’t a perfect fit, but nothing is.
“Come in for an interview,” says Dean Melrose, holding out his card. “Let me change your mind.”
 |
“You’re late.”
Bea’s waiting on the bookstore steps.
“Sorry,” he says, unlocking the door. “Still not a library,” he adds as she slaps a five-dollar bill on the counter and disappears into the art section. She makes a noncommittal uh-huh, and he can hear her pulling books from the shelves.
Bea is the only one who hasn’t changed, the only one who doesn’t seem to treat him differently.
“Hey,” he says, following her down the aisle. “Do I look strange to you?”
“No,” she says, scanning the shelves. “Bea, look at me.”
She turns, gives him a long up-and-down appraisal. “You mean besides the lipstick on your neck?”
Henry blushes, wiping at his skin. “Yeah,” he says, “besides that.” She shrugs. “Not really.”
But it’s there, in her eyes, that unmistakable shimmer, a faint and iridescent film that seems to spread as she studies him. “Really? Nothing?”
She pulls a book from the shelf. “Henry, what do you want me to say?” she asks, searching for a second. “You look like you.”
“So you don’t…” He doesn’t know how to ask. “You don’t want me, then?”
Bea turns, and looks at him for a long moment, and then bursts out laughing.
“Sorry, hon,” she says when she catches her breath. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re cute. But I’m still a lesbian.”
And the moment she says it, he feels absurd, and absurdly relieved. “What’s this about?” she asks.
I made a deal with the devil and now whenever anyone looks at me, they see only what they want. He shakes his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“Well,” she says, adding another book to her stack, “I think I found a new thesis.”
She carries the books back up to the counter, and spreads them out on top of the ledgers and receipts. Henry watches her turn through the pages until she finds what she’s looking for in each, then steps back, so he can see what she’s found.
Three portraits, all of them renditions of a young woman, though they clearly come from different times and different schools. “What am I looking at?” he asks.
“I call her the ghost in the frame.”
One is a pencil sketch, the edges rough, unfinished. In it, the woman lies on her stomach, tangled in sheets. Hair pools around her, and her face is little more than panes of shadow, a faint scattering of freckles across her cheeks. The title of the piece is written in Italian.
Ho Portado le Stelle a Letto
The English translation sits beneath.
I Took the Stars to Bed.
The second piece is French, a more abstract portrait, done in the vivid blues and greens of Impressionism. The woman sits on a beach, a book facedown on the sand beside her. She looks over her shoulder at the artist, only the edge of her face visible, her freckles little more than smudges of light, absences of color.
La Sirène, this one is called.
The Siren.
The last piece is a shallow carving, a silhouette sculpture shot through with light, pinpoint tunnels burrowed through a pane of cherry wood.
Constellation.
“Do you see it?” asks Bea. “They’re portraits.”
“No,” she says, “they’re portraits of the same woman.” Henry lifts a brow. “That’s a stretch.”
“Look at the angle of her jaw, the line of her nose, and the freckles.
Count them.”
Henry does. In every image, there are exactly seven.
Bea touches the first and second. “The Italian one’s from the turn of the nineteenth century. The French one is fifty years later. And this one,” she says, tapping the photo of the sculpture, “this one’s from the sixties.”
“So maybe one was inspired by the other,” says Henry. “Wasn’t there a tradition of—I forget what it was called, but basically visual telephone? One artist favored something, and then another artist favored that artist, and so on? Like a template.”
But Bea is already waving him away. “Sure, in lexicons and bestiaries, but not in formal schools of art. This is like putting a girl with a pearl earring in a Warhol, and a Degas, without ever seeing the Rembrandt. And even if she became a template, the fact is, this ‘template’ influenced centuries of art. She’s a piece of connective tissue between eras. So…”
“So…” echoes Henry.
“So, who was she?” Bea’s eyes are bright, the way Robbie’s sometimes are when he’s just nailed a performance, or done a bump of coke, and Henry doesn’t want to bring her down, but she’s clearly waiting for him to say something.
“Okay,” he starts, gently. “But Bea, what if she was no one? Even if these are based on the same woman, what if the first artist simply made her up?” Bea frowns, already shaking her head. “Look,” he says, “no one wants you to find your thesis topic more than I do. For the sake of this store, as much as your sanity. And this all sounds cool. But didn’t your last proposal get nixed for being too whimsical?”
“Esoteric.”
“Right,” says Henry. “And if a topic like ‘Postmodernism and its Effects on New York Architecture’ was too esoteric, how do you think Dean Parrish will feel about this?”
He gestures to the open texts, the freckled faces staring up from every page.
Bea looks at him in silence for a long moment, and then at the books.
“Fuck!” she shouts, taking up one of the giant books and storming out of the shop.
Henry watches her go and sighs. “Not a library,” he calls after her, returning the rest to their shelves.
