Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [4]
And yet, I found my thoughts reaching into the past. Turning their backs on all the hard-wrought perfections of the hour, they were searching for the sweet uncertainties of a bygone year and for all its chance encounters—encounters which in the moment had seemed so haphazard and effervescent but which with time took on some semblance of fate.
Yes, my thoughts turned to Tinker and to Eve—but they turned to Wallace Wolcott and Dicky Vanderwhile and to Anne Grandyn too. And to those turns of the kaleidoscope that gave color and shape to the passage of my 1938.
Standing at my husband’s side, I found myself intent on keeping the memories of the year to myself.
It wasn’t that any of them were so scandalous that they would have shocked Val or threatened the harmony of our marriage—on the contrary, if I had shared them Val would probably have been even more endeared to me. But I didn’t want to share them. Because I didn’t want to dilute them.
Above all else, I wanted to be alone. I wanted to step out of the glare of my own circumstances. I wanted to go get a drink in a hotel bar. Or better yet, take a taxi down to the Village for the first time in how many years....
Yes, Tinker looked poor in that picture. He looked poor and hungry and without prospects. But he looked young and vibrant too; and strangely alive.
Suddenly, it was as if the faces on the wall were watching me. The ghosts on the subway, tired and alone, were studying my face, taking in those traces of compromise that give aging human features their unique sense of pathos.
Then Val surprised me.
—Let’s go, he said.
I looked up and he smiled.
—Come on. We’ll come back some morning when it isn’t so busy.
—Okay.
It was crowded in the middle of the gallery so we kept to the periphery, walking past the pictures. The faces flickered by like the faces of prisoners looking through those little square openings in maximum security cells. They followed me with their gaze as if to say: Where do you think you’re going? And then just before we reached the exit one of them stopped me in my tracks.
A wry smile formed on my face.
—What is it? asked Val.
—It’s him again.
On the wall between two portraits of older women, there was a second portrait of Tinker. Tinker in a cashmere coat, clean shaven, a crisp Windsor knot poking over the collar of a custom-made shirt.
Val dragged me forward by the hand until we were a foot from the picture.
—You mean the same one from before?
—Yes.
—It couldn’t be.
Val doubled back to the first portrait. Across the room I could see him studying the dirtier face with care, looking for distinguishing marks. He came back and took up his place a foot from the man in the cashmere coat.
—Incredible, he said. It’s the very same fellow!
—Please step back from the art, a security guard said.
We stepped back.
—If you didn’t know, you’d think they were two different men entirely.
—Yes, I said. You’re right.
—Well, he certainly got back on his feet!
Val was suddenly in a good mood. The journey from threadbare to cashmere restored his natural sense of optimism.
—No, I said. This is the earlier picture.
—What’s that?
—The other picture was after this one. It was 1939.
I pointed to the tag.
—This was taken in 1938.
You couldn’t blame Val for making the mistake. It was natural to assume that this was the later picture—and not simply because it was hung later in the show. In the 1938 picture Tinker not only looked better off, he looked older too: His face was fuller, and it had a suggestion of pragmatic world-weariness, as if a string of successes had towed along an ugly truth or two. While the picture taken a year later looked more like the portrait of a peacetime twenty-year-old: vibrant and