American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [71]
On the way home from the restaurant where she had celebrated with some museum people and critics and old friends, she caught sight of her reflection in the window of a closed store and stopped. She was wearing a brown coat over her long dress and a scarf tied around her neck. She was struck by something about the coat. It was wool, not too heavy. A spring coat, her mother would have called it, and the way it fell on her, or didn’t fall exactly but held its own shape, not accommodating to hers, seemed decidedly old-fashioned in contrast to the flowing dress. It made her look, she thought, like a child. For a second a specific child came to mind, then disappeared in a flash. The image of the child reminded her of earlier lives she had led and the coat reminded her of the shapes she had tried to fit into throughout her life. She felt the childishness of her own inability to either adapt to the shape or throw off the coat. She would never, she realized, have been happy adapting to the cut of the coat. She should have learned that by now, but still there were times when she felt haunted by an uneasy feeling that she was not living the correct life, that she should never have become an artist. But it was too late. And anyway now she understood: Every choice would have brought some kind of pain. This life was the correct life. This was who she was.
She walked to the corner and waited for the light to change. There was a metal garbage can on the sidewalk, debris moving around inside it as the late April wind blew a little stronger than gently and the blue-gray underwater light of the city streets in the early morning appeared to make objects float. The traffic light seemed to take forever. She stared up at the yellow fixture suspended above the street, and within it the illuminated red circle. A bright orb pulsing against the dull colors of the faded night sky, the looming neutral buildings. Another memory formed and then disintegrated in her mind. She felt a shift inside as if she had remembered a name that she had been trying to summon all day, or for decades. She couldn’t have said what the name was, but she knew that something she had worried about was no longer worth troubling over. She knew that her stolen pictures were safe. The light changed again while she thought this and instead of crossing the street right away she stood there and took off her coat.
The breeze felt good. She let the cool unclean air ripple through her long dress. She cradled the coat in her arms for a while. Then she folded the coat and settled it into the garbage can, nestled among the newspapers and wrappers and food. The light changed. She crossed the street. She left the coat. She headed home.
Iris
After Iris and Alex got divorced, Iris moved with Anna to the West Side. They lived in a rent-stabilized apartment in the Nineties on West End Avenue where the rooms branched off of a long narrow hallway like pages falling off the spine of an old book. Guests were always getting lost and ending up in the pantry by way of the maid’s bathroom. Of course there was no maid. Alex remarried and lived on Park Avenue and Anna spent her weekends with him and his new family. Sunday nights she would return home to Iris, watch some Masterpiece Theatre