American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [20]
Her bus came. It moved stealthily up Sixth Avenue like some slow methodical beast. She enjoyed watching the people arrive and depart and she furrowed her pretty brow and screwed up her expression as she took in everything about them: flat shoes, high boots, narrow pants that had come into fashion, thin ties that were last year’s style, but more than clothes she observed the physical interactions between the people, the way a woman leaned forward toward a man who hung back, the tilt of a head as it responded to a question. Most of all she watched the children. Their feet dangled from the bus seats like branches waving above a pond, seeming to reach downward but then kicked back and forth by an invisible wind. Their mouths grimaced when they wanted to grimace. They squirmed when sweaters were buttoned up. They knelt backwards on the seat to look out the windows. They played with cards, jacks, balls, pennies strewn on an empty seat. They stared at nothing with their pink mouths open. Sometimes, they stared at her.
She got off. She turned a corner and walked up a block toward Fifth Avenue. In the middle of the block she entered a building. It was the Museum of Modern Art. Upstairs she met with a man in his office. He told her how excited they were to be presenting her work. He held out his hands and clasped them both around her small one. He said it would be a triumphant show. He strode through galleries and showed her where her pictures would be hung. The woman held tightly to her pocketbook. She was proud but also nervous. This museum in which she had spent so many warm happy hours since childhood now seemed vast and cavernous and cold. She wondered how her photographs would feel up on its walls. Her photographs had feelings in her mind. She felt for the first time a maternal concern about exposing them to the world. She had shown her pictures before but never in such a grand setting. Still, she was very proud.
The curator and two benefactors of the museum took her out to lunch in midtown. There were murals on the walls of the restaurant. She had a glass of wine. She had another. The curator had more. He said, of course she was justly famous for her black-and-white pictures but that to be honest he preferred the new color work. Less arty. Everyone ordered. She asked for the Dover sole, a specialty of the house, and handed the thick red leather menu back to the waiter. She looked at the pattern of the silver. She had worked with famous photographers and now one of the benefactors asked her about the famous men. There had been talk that she had had an affair with one of them and it was obvious that that was what the benefactress was implying and trying to verify with her questioning. The woman had the entitled air of the wealthy and privileged without the tact or discretion and she pretended not to notice that the person she was speaking to did not want to answer. It went on this way. The rich woman’s mouth pursed before she took a sip of her drink. The rings on her fingers looked like enormous winged insects refracted through the crystal of her highball glass. Finally she said: I can see why you never married. You don’t want to reveal anything. At this point the curator noticed what was happening and deflected the conversation with