Not, I want to be clear, with his head turned. His head was perfectly forward. His chin was at the angle a chin is at when a man is walking somewhere he is going. His eyes, however—those mercury eyes, the ones that had held mine on the plain and not let me look away—were on me in the mirror. The reflection of his face in the panel we were passing was looking, with absolute attention, at the reflection of my face in the same panel. I had no defense for it. There was no shoulder of his to look past, no waiter’s tray to attend to, no warm-deflecting laugh to deploy.
And so, after a long held second in which the pilot light behind my ribs flared up and the inside of my left cheek did not, for once, find the molar, I looked.
I looked at her. At me.
At first, I did not recognize her.
The woman in the mirror was—yes, in a grey hoodie, yes, hair down, yes, the knees of her tights a disaster—but the face, the body it belonged to, had been revised by something more forceful, more editorial than time or a good night’s sleep.
It was the me with the volume turned up.
I paused, then looked again.
My eyes were the same, but sharper—the tiredness had been replaced with clarity, a new focus that made them almost predatory. The line of my jaw was cleaner. My lips were fuller, the color of them darkened by something internal, as if the wanting had finally come to live there and was eating through from the inside. My cheekbones were more distinct, like Margot’s in her best photographs, but less rehearsed: there was nothing staged about the flush that lived there and the effect was not cosmetic. The effect was hunger, metabolized. The wantingthat had always lived half-starved behind my eyes was now on its own caloric intake, and it had started to rebuild.
The neck was longer than I remembered. The line of my shoulders was surer, set just a fraction wider, as if I had been training for a marathon of being looked at and was, against all precedent, getting stronger by the step. The sigils that ran up my neck and across the hollow at the angle of my jaw looked—fuck, I could not deny it—good. Not pretty. Not decorative. They looked like something I had earned, by out-wanting everything that had tried to make me small.
I could not look away from her.
From us.
His gaze met mine in the mirror and did not, for the first time since arriving in this place, seem like a challenge.
The corner of my eye caught, on its way down to the floor, a flicker along the line of his cheekbone in the panel.
The flicker was gold.
Not the oyster-pale, soft mother-of-pearl shimmer that had been settled along his jaw and the inside of his wrist since he had walked toward me on the plain. Gold. A warm, deep, unmistakable gold, the color of a coin held for a long time in a warm palm, the color of a wedding band beaten thin, and it ran along the cheekbone of the man in the panel from the corner of his eye to the small high curve at his temple, and it sat there, vivid, for the half of one heartbeat.
I stopped walking.
The hand at my back stopped with me. He did not pretend. He did not, the way he might easily have, kept walking and pulled me along with him; he did not, the way most men I had ever met would have, looked at the panel and said nothing. He stopped when I stopped.
I looked. The gold held. Then it went.
I watched, in the panel, his eyes close. He closed them with the unhurried discipline of a man closing the lid of an instrument he had been about to play and had decided not to play. The shimmer along his cheekbone, when he opened his eyes again, was oyster-pale. Settled. His own.
“I will explain that,” he said, very quietly. He had not moved his head. He spoke straight ahead, into the gallery, and his voice carried the way water carries across a still pool. “Come. There is so much to explain.”
Thedoor,whenhestopped us in front of it at the end of the third gallery, had not been a door a moment before.
It had been one mirrored panel among the hundred mirrored panels of the wall behind the colonnade, no different in size or finish or framing from any of its neighbors, indistinguishable, and then he turned his hand and the panel swung. It swung inward on a hinge I could not, looking at it directly, locate. It opened into a low warm gold.
It was a study.
Walls of dark wood—not paneling, the wood itself, the long unbroken grain of it polished to a soft sheen the color of strong tea, and the wood had been chosen by somebody who had decided, at some point in a very long life, that he would rather sit inside a tree than next to one. A low fire burned in a black grate set into the far wall. The fire was the first fire I had seen in this place. It made the small wet sound a real fire makes. It threw real shadow. Two deep chairs sat at angles to the grate, the leather of them oxblood, soft, the arms shined to a paler tone where a pair of forearms had rested for a long time. A low table between them.
Behind a long writing desk on the right-hand wall, the wall itself was made of mirror—not the paneled mirror of the gallery but a single tall vertical strip of silver running floor to ceiling like a window, the surface of it pearled with the same soft iridescence I had touched on Suydam Street. It moved very faintly. It was not, I realised after a half-second, reflecting the room. It was reflecting nothing. It was waiting.
He brought me to the chair on the left. He did not seat me by his hand at my back. He brought his right hand around to the front of me, the gloved one, and put two gloved fingers under my elbow with a courtesy so old it had no era, and he lowered me into the chair as a man might lower a glass he did not intend to spill. The leather took me. It took me in the small warm exhale a chair takes a body it has been waiting for, and my spine, which had been holding itself in the long polite C of a woman pretending nothing was wrong, gave up the C in two soft stages and went into the back of the chair, and the back of the chair received it.
I made a small sound. I did not mean to.
He knelt.
He went down to one knee in front of me, and then to both. The black coat fell around him in two long lines on either side of his thighs. His head was at the height of my chest. His hands, both of them, lifted to the wet ruin of my right shoe.
The shoe was a Mary Jane, scuffed, bought on sale in Crown Heights two years ago, and it had filled with a black puddle on Knickerbocker Avenue at ten past nine and had been, since then, a small private misery on the end of my leg. He looked at it. He looked at it with the same long held attention with which he had looked at me on the plain. He lifted my heel. He turned the foot a quarter inch in his palm, the way a jeweler turns a stone toward the light. His thumb, gloved, found the small wet buckle at the side of the strap. He did not, having found it, hurry. He undidit with the slow precise patience of a man who had decided that this buckle, on this foot, on this woman, was the only thing he had to attend to in any of the realms he was sovereign over.
