American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [19]
Do you think he really loves her?
Who?
Joe.
I don’t know, Milo said. What do you think?
His eyes were closed. She was working on his hand. He opened his eyes and looked up at her from his most peripheral vision. They were a soft shade of slate blue with flecks of yellow. His hair, she had never really noticed his hair before, it was brown and fell over his eyes when he looked downward. She felt grateful that he had taken her question seriously. She had been afraid to ask. She had told herself that she would not be the one to talk about it first but she had gone ahead and asked him anyway. He was looking at her, waiting for her, and she could not keep silent.
Honor said: I think he loves them both.
1969
One day the story changed. It could happen that way, just like life. There was a new character, a new era, the passage of time. There was the smiling picture from Pearl’s living room but now the picture was in a different room, lying face up on top of a pile of papers and pictures and books. The frame was tarnished. The pile was too high, nearly teetering, and it sat under a desk shoved out of the way, one of those piles nobody wants to claim. On the desk were spread out contact sheets of black and white photographs and Kodachrome slides scattered like shells on a beach. Across the room a larger desk sat also covered with photographs and cameras and rolls of film in their canisters. The room turned out to be most of an entire apartment, a tiny one-bedroom in a brownstone. An ornate marble mantel at one end, two extravagant windows overlooking a city garden, a kitchenette tucked into the corner. Off the main room a small bedroom big enough for only a bed. A flowered sheet tacked up as a curtain. It felt like an office and it was a studio of a sort but you could also sense that someone lived there: the dirty dish on the table, the glass of water left on the mantel, a dress sprawled across the white foam of unmade sheets.
A door closed. You couldn’t really see the woman but she walked quickly downstairs four steep flights and opened the front door—the sun came breaking in and then she emerged into the street like an actress stepping onstage. The bustle of commerce and society traipsed past as if it had been choreographed for her this sunny morning in May. The woman was in her fifties but looked younger, attractive, independent, you could tell from her determined posture and no wedding ring. She wore a dress but you could also tell that that was because she was going someplace important not because she wore a dress every day. Her hair was dark brown nearly black and she’d had it done and it fell smoothly nearly to her shoulders and she wore a headband because people did at the time, even older women. She carried a pocketbook with a small handle. Across the street from her stood a young woman perhaps in her early thirties who appeared to be watching the woman coming out of the brownstone. The older woman did not notice the younger woman. The older woman looked at her watch and walked toward the bus stop.
She waited for the bus. The bus stop was in front of a cake shop called the Jon Vie Bakery and she looked in the window of the shop at the cakes. There was a cake on display that looked like a doll wearing an enormous skirt. There was a real doll at the center of the cake sticking up from it and then the skirt was baked all around her in a dome shape. From time to time little girls would be drawn to the window and would pull their mothers over and point out the cake. The woman with the pocketbook smiled at the mothers in acknowledgment of the little girls’ joy. The little girls’ shadows fanned out