“What do you want to do?”
“Do?” I asked.Are you seeing this?
“You can’t tell me you aren’t interested.”
I wasn’t interested in a stranger’s attention, nor was I troubled by it. Men rarely understood this. “How do you know he isn’t looking at you?” I asked. “Did you think about that? Maybe you went to school together.” But wait, I didn’t mean that. It sounded unkind. The man was clearly older than Jonathan. The old man was older than my old man.
“It isn’t me,” my husband said.
“Okay then, it’s me. We’re not going to invite him for dinner.”
“You don’t have any curiosity?”
I had plenty of curiosity, but I wasn’t curious about this. My dear dead father, whom I had seen not nearly enough of in his life, gave me one piece of advice that I have found endlessly useful: If you don’t want to engage with someone, don’t engage, by which he meant don’t smack the side of the car that cuts you off at the crosswalk because the person in the car might have a gun. Don’t think you get to say your piece and then walk away. That’s what I was thinking when Jonathan left to follow the man who had followed me there. Not that Jonathan was angry; it wasn’t that at all. He meant to start a conversation with a stranger.
I wanted to think about nothing but those horses, but the distraction of my absent husband proved powerful. Jonathan was gone and then he was still gone. When I became annoyed, I went to find him.
There they were, the two of them tucked in a corner of the next gallery. Jonathan was talking, and the man, who wore a navy blazer and pink collared shirt, gray slacks, looked up at him, nodding. His hair was thick and straight and very white, and his glasses were tortoise and round, topped by a noticeable pair of eyebrows. When he saw me crossing the room, he touched my husband’s arm and my husband turned and smiled at me, a smile that said, You’re never going to believe this.
“You’re never going to believe this,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, and then I said hello to the man.
He nodded at me as if he wanted to speak and could not speak. His obvious mortification made me feel tenderly towards him. I know, I wanted to say to this stranger in regard to my husband,he does this sometimes.
“This is your stepfather,” Jonathan said.
I looked at the man, and then at Jonathan. Of course it was not my stepfather. Lucas Ekker lived outside of Boston in a large house with my mother.
“Keep going back. One more stepfather,” Jonathan said, watching me work.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie Triplett said.
All of this transpired quietly; no one turned to watch life’s drama unpacked in the gallery, but still I made a sound. I put my hand to my mouth to stop it, but it had already gotten away from me. It was his voice, Eddie Triplett’s voice coming out of this old man’s mouth. “Eddie.”
“I didn’t mean to chase you,” he said.
“He thought he saw your mother,” my husband said.
Eddie shook his head. “I knew it wasn’t your mother.”
“At first,” Jonathan said. “When he first saw you. Look, you’re crying. Daphne never cries,” he said to Eddie. “I can count on one hand the number of times.” He cut himself off to take the handkerchief out of his pocket and hand it to me.
“Duck,” Eddie said, his voice full of sorrow.
And with that I bowed my head and covered my face. I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards. It was not a few tears. Jonathan put his arm around my shoulder, understanding none of it but knowing the big reveal should not have come here, in front of art. “What do you say the three of us go to the Dining Room and get a glass of water, a cup of tea?”
Did I nod? It didn’t matter. I said nothing as my husband guided us out of Modern and Contemporary, Eddie Triplettfollowing along. I remembered Eddie Triplett as a taller man, but that’s because I had been quite small at the time of our acquaintance. I hadn’t seen him in more than forty years, almost forty-five. Eddie Triplett walked behind us now, wanting to die. How did I know this? Because I wanted to die myself, and our hearts were forever stitched together, mine and Eddie’s.
The Dining Room was more or less above us. Jonathan knew where the elevators were and led us there, in part to make things easier for me and in part because his bad knee got worse the more he used it. The three of us stepped into that empty mechanical box, and as the doors slid shut, my crying abruptly ceased, as if I had wrestled back into place that part of myself that had come unstuck. I blew my nose gently on Jonathan’s handkerchief and looked at Eddie. How had it never occurred to me that an elevator was so much like a car pointing up? An elevator car. “Remind you of anything?” I asked.
“See the US-Ain your Chev-ro-let,” he sang quietly, his eyes watching the illuminated numbers above the door.
And that made me laugh so abruptly it came out more like a bark.
“I missed the joke,” Jonathan said.
“At one time that was your wife’s favorite song,” Eddie said.
