The Manhattan Lunch: Two Versions

I. Magazine Girls

For about a month after Hennessey was outright fired by the brokerage house, waiting to get what was sure to be the indictment from the federal court, he simply didn’t go out much at all.

Most of the time Hennessey stayed in his spacious apartment on West Fifty-Fifth, and he made sandwiches for nearly all his meals, occasionally heading to one of the many reasonably priced restaurants on Ninth Avenue in the evening. On Ninth Avenue he would first walk some. He would maybe go to a place called El Deportivo that was Puerto Rican, nothing fancy, where along with the stewed guisada they gave you a choice of white or yellow rice and black or red beans (he always went for the yellow and black combination); or there was the Galaxy Café, where never taking one of the booths or the tables in back, Hennessey would sit at the diner-style counter more or less staring at the framed photographs of supposed entertainment celebrities there on the wall above the shelves of pies and cakes under glass (he wondered if anybody else his age, thirty-five, even remembered anymore shaved-headed Telly Savalas, shown with his name scrawled prominently in one corner of the studio-lit shot). But when Hennessey found himself paying at the Galaxy’s cash register one evening and being told that because he had arrived before six he qualified for what they advertised with a window placard as the “Early Birdies’ Special,” he became self-conscious—after that, despite the decent meals there, he started avoiding the Galaxy altogether, if truth be known. Of course, he avoided news on the Internet and especially in the newspapers. The Wall Street Journal’s extensive coverage of the supposed financial scandal was painful to face, and much worse would be to pick up the floppy tabloid slab of the Post and possibly see (this happened once) his own name prominently mentioned in yet another piece concerning the “outrageous swindle” and it being a good example of the current “rampant greed,” or that’s what it was as far as the noisy Post was concerned.

He had played hockey in prep school (his father, a state-office clerical worker in Massachusetts, moonlighted weekends as a salesman in the appliance department of Sears to help pay the bills to send him to ritzy Milton Academy; his kind mother, so concerned that Hennessey do well in everything in life, always encouraged him even when his grades weren’t all that good), true, he had played school hockey, though Hennessey certainly hadn’t been of the caliber to play college-level, at Division III Bowdoin or anywhere else. Still, he liked hockey, and it got so that his evenings took on a pattern of watching all the televised Rangers games that winter, with the home ones broadcast from the Garden less than a couple of dozen blocks away. On some evenings he watched the pregame show and thought he might take a cab or even walk at a good clip down to the Garden to buy a twenty-five-buck ticket from one of the guys in hooded sweat shirts perpetually pedaling them outside; there was always an available seat, scalpers’ surplus, when it was somebody of little consequence like the Phoenix or Vancouver team in town, but he never quite mustered the resolve for that.

He slept a lot, screened calls to make sure that it wouldn’t be somebody from his family or whatever who might be offering more advice or condolences, neither of which Hennessey really needed. But one night at about nine he looked at the caller ID to see that it was Tom Bettencourt, an old pal from Bowdoin. Tom was somebody Hennessey had spent a lot of time with when they’d both first found themselves in New York after graduation, before Tom’s marriage and his kids, and Hennessey did answer the ring, glad to hear Tom’s sort of dry but laughing voice again. Automatically, Hennessey went through his side of the story on what had happened, though Tom really didn’t seem to want to hear too much about that, which was refreshing. Then Hennessey asked Tom about his wife and kids, probably perfunctorily and part of the set protocol carried out by a bachelor when dealing with an old friend now married. Tom himself didn’t seem to want to dwell on that either, and they just laughed some about guys they knew or girls they dated at Bowdoin or nearby Bates College, even the wonder of “Lobster Night” every other Sunday; with Bowdoin being right there in Brunswick, Maine—and, so, a ready supply of lobsters from the docks only miles away—a Bowdoin guy working his way through a bona fide pile of the red carcasses on a Sunday night plate oddly became a routine event.

“We got tired of lobster, can you imagine it?” Tom laughed.

“I can imagine it, all right,” Hennessey said. “I used to have recurring nightmares about all those shells to be cracked, like it was so much endless work I had to do.”

Which was how they both simply started agreeing that they surely should get together, it had been too long since they had. That also led to Hennessey learning that Tom Bettencourt wasn’t working at the New York Observer anymore, but had moved to the staff of Vanity Fair; he was doing the same kind of editorial work he had done at the Observer, which involved some article assigning but mostly copyediting. Tom suggested that with the building for Condé Nast located so close to where Hennessey lived—it being right off Times Square, a new skyscraper with the distinctive rounded-off edge to just one corner of its facade at Forty-Second Street—they should have lunch at the Condé Nast commissary. Tom assured Hennessey the scene there was worth seeing, and, granted, though it was only a cafeteria, this was an exceptionally posh one and designed by the very famous postmodern architect, a guy who had done major museum buildings and such throughout the world but whose name Hennessey didn’t recognize; plus, as Tom added: “It can be a real trip, the scene there, because it serves all the magazines the company owns, us and The New Yorker and the rest. And if we’re real lucky we’ll see some of the models from Vogue, who come to the building for meetings to discuss shoots, I guess, even come for the actual studio shoots somewhere in the building. And I’m talking supermodels, man—certified Grade A and then some, if you know what I mean.”

Hennessey laughed, and while he was still fully aware that Tom had indeed brushed aside any mention whatsoever from Hennessey about his current problems, Hennessey knew that he, Hennessey, was very comfortable with, and therefore appreciative of, that brushing aside, if only done out of politeness on Tom’s part—or perhaps because of the fact that their friendship had nothing to do with Hennessey’s current serious problems, really.

Nevertheless, Hennessey nearly backed out of the lunch at the last minute. He rehearsed a couple of excuses to make, because on Monday of the week when they were supposed to meet on Thursday, Hennessey had gone to Lower Manhattan to talk with his lawyers again, a session that hadn’t gone well at all. But on the Thursday—a very gray midday with that almost ammonia smell of possible snow in the cold February air—he walked on Fifty-Fifth over to Broadway and headed into Times Square, past the theaters and to the sleek skyscraper—bone-white stone and tinted glass—that housed the Condé Nast operations. He had to go through extensive security, all right, and the guy in the blue blazer standing at one of the upright reception desks—there were several, like an airport-counter operation—called up to Tom at the Vanity Fair offices and then issued Hennessey a pass with his name on it, printed out right there, the guy instructing Hennessey to keep ahold of it and directing him to the particular elevator in the long row of them that served the floor he needed. Hennessey folded the sheet, tucked it in his sheepskin car coat’s pocket.

Tom Bettencourt wore slacks, an open-collar striped dress shirt, and chocolate suede desert boots, no suit jacket; his tuft of red hair was still wild as ever, but now, somewhat moonfaced, Tom looked decidedly heavier, more of the father that he was, maybe, since the last time Hennessey had seen him (Tom had two young kids, both boys). As it turned out they didn’t head right to the commissary, but went on an impromptu tour of the offices, which admittedly Hennessey found interesting, not quite what he had expected. Actually, the place was rather empty, quiet, with a sequence of white-walled rooms uniformly carpeted in tasteful dark blue, the furniture just black steel desks and chrome-and-black-leather chairs; Tom explained that the editor in charge now—the guy who had brought Tom with him to the magazine from the Observer—was a minimalist at heart and had the whole place redone that way. There was one interesting room where all the mock-ups for the pages for the upcoming issue—entire articles and advertising layout—were lined up in sequence on lit electronic panels around the white walls, strung like boxcars, and then there was Tom’s own small office. It was white-walled like all the rest, and Tom, obviously proud, showed Hennessey a literary journal that came out of some Midwestern university in which he had recently published a short story. With his wise-guy laugh, Tom informed Hennessey that he still hoped to finish a novel and publish it, doing something significant with real literature, rather than—he loopingly waved his hand while sitting there in his chair and leaning back from the bare black steel desk, as if to take in the whole operation of Vanity Fair—yes, rather than what was around him: “All this yuppie horseshit of slick magazine writing, the glitz and high-class gossip that Vanity Fair is really all about, you know.”

At which point Tom got up and said it was time to eat, the two of them taking an elevator down several floors to the commissary. Tom nodded hello to a couple of people they passed in the offices on the way out, also exchanged talk with somebody in the elevator.

The commissary was as thoroughly dramatic as promised, a true expanse with some smaller private rooms off the main concourse and easily a couple of hundred people eating at the tables arranged in clusters, restaurant-style. The colors were bright, all oranges and blues, and the free-form panels of the undulating dividing walls suggested giant futuristic bird wings, maybe, seeming to flap their way along beneath the glowing inset lights up top that looked like stars against the high ceiling’s very black background. Yet the more impressive show was probably not in the design within by the famous architect (who in this assignment, Hennessey told himself, appeared to be trying altogether too hard) but there at the table Tom selected for its view. The skyscraper’s side was glass here, and outside, seemingly close enough to touch, was the panorama of Bryant Park behind the ornate rise of the Public Library—the feathery, winter-bare trees of the park, also its paved terraces and its walkways and its many benches; everything in the winter day was rendered a mesmerizing underwater hue due to the tinting of the huge glass sheets that formed the sweep of the building’s facade at this level relatively lower down, four or five floors above the street. They talked about how good the food was, just cream soup and pita sandwiches for both of them, but quite good, they talked more about what they read about Bowdoin lately in the alumni magazine, so much new construction there and also Bowdoin’s genuine track star, a sprinter somehow recruited from Jamaica, an acknowledged hotbed for sprinters, somebody who had nearly made it, believe or not, to the summer Olympics for his country the year before; they talked of a lot of small things, and Hennessey had to admit that for the first time in who knows how long he was feeling something close to relaxed.

All of which is to say, that made what happened all the more strange when it did happen. Because when there was an actual nudge from Tom’s desert boot under the table to signal Hennessey that about to enter were two of the sort of models he had mentioned on the phone, “magazine girls” and definitely from Vogue, Hennessey did look that way, watched the pair of models come from a smaller dining room off the main concourse and make their way to the front doors, having finished whatever meal of probably a simple salad and iced tea that they had merely poked away at.

Both were tall, willowy at five-ten or so, and the one with ash-blond hair, mile-high cheekbones, and the mandatory pout, she wore just casual jeans and a sweater; the other, with a glossy black pageboy cut so straight in bangs that it could have been done using a steel rule to guide the scissors, such full lips, she was dressed equally casually, loose corduroy slacks in her case with a sweater—both wore pristine running shoes, most likely taking a break from a shoot. They were undeniably and entirely lovely, bordering on ethereal, with that rhythmic strut that fashion models never really abandon, whether it be entering a bar in the Hamptons in the summer—as Hennessey had come to learn from his own carefree seaside summers renting a fine beach house there with bachelor pals—or now simply leaving a cafeteria—shoulders alternatingly swaying, perfect posture and the long, long legs seemingly a couple of paces ahead of them, almost as if each of the girls were leaning back to hold an imaginary pooch tugging her along on a leash. Yes, Hennessey looked at them as he sat at the table, the clutter of dishes from the meal in front of him, he looked at the girls—and he simply started crying, full-fledged, hunch-shouldered sobbing, pretty loud.

Tom at first must have thought Hennessey was joking around, and then—as Hennessey didn’t let up and people at other tables nearby were, in fact, looking their way—Tom seemed to just want to be the hell out of there. Hennessey, still crying, mumbled something about how absolutely beautiful they were, and Tom, speaking low and with a touch of detectable anger—as more people at other tables were definitely looking at them now, it was embarrassing—Tom finally said to Hennessey at the table, “What the fuck is the matter with you, man?”

Everything was quite awkward as Hennessey, composed again, and Tom parted ten minutes later, uneasily shaking hands down in the lobby.

The next week Hennessey tried calling Tom Bettencourt a couple of times, leaving messages both at his office and at home that weren’t returned. And by the following week Hennessey was busy and he had no time for something like calls to Tom Bettencourt right then, with the indictment about to come down at last. Or perhaps Hennessey convinced himself that Tom Bettencourt, who aspired to publishing short stories in literary journals of the flimsily bound variety that he had showed Hennessey in the office—journals of no consequence that surely nobody really read—wasn’t worth dealing with, would never amount to much in life.

Truth of the matter was that Hennessey suddenly was very busy.

His head lawyer told Hennessey that he, the lawyer, would need to meet with him personally several times more that week before the upcoming two sessions for Hennessey with the prosecuting lawyers and investigators, one staff of them from the state attorney general’s office and then the other with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, the latter pushing for considerable prison time.

II. Falling into Paintings

Hope’s life at seventy-eight had its understandable routine. There was time with her one daughter Anne, living up in Larchmont, and the two grandchildren, also Hope’s considerable reading and the so-called appreciation courses she took, sponsored by Columbia.

Which is how it happened.

Actually, the worst thing about it all was the coverage that started turning up everywhere, the attention compounding and lasting for a full few days. First on the local New York news and then, apparently, on various news websites, a compact version of what happened provided by a wire service.

At her age Hope didn’t know what to think of attention like that.

She wasn’t what her adult daughter Anne or anybody else would consider very media savvy, not by any means. And for Hope, more than simply fainting that way in the course of the lecture for her seniors’ art appreciation course there in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and hitting the painting’s sheened canvas, which ripped badly in the course of the collapse, yes, more than that was the whole certainly odd adventure of being rushed by the wailing yellow and blue ambulance van right down Fifth Avenue. They sped beside the park with its surely winter-bare trees, then swerved across town on maybe Fifty-Seventh—and this she distinctly remembered—the two muscular EMS attendants in their dark-blue jumpsuits occasionally looking down at her and smiling as she lay stretched out like that, both, comically, with identical trimmed moustaches; one was talking to the other about where they were heading on this particular run, Saint Clare’s near Times Square, which they apparently had nicknamed the “junkie hospital.” She was out of the emergency room by seven that evening, all tests proving she was fine, in truth quite fit for a woman of seventy-eight years old, the peachy-cheeked young intern told her. Her daughter Anne showed up from the suburbs in Anne’s husband’s Saab wagon to drive her back to her apartment on the Upper East Side, in what used to be known as Yorkville. Anne wanted to stay for the night, but Hope assured her there was nothing wrong, even tried to make a joke out of the whole thing by saying she had no idea why those attendants called Saint Clare’s the junkie hospital, demeaning it that way, seeing that to her everybody there had seemed professional, attentive, and efficient, especially the boyish intern who, when asked, told Hope in detail all about how his own parents in New Jersey had sacrificed a lot to send him through Albert Einstein for medical school.

The phone started ringing that evening, when a cousin in Connecticut had first seen the short TV squib of the story showing the museum gallery and the large Delacroix canvas, which, as Hope had already been assured by everybody at the hospital, could be repaired easily enough, despite the vertical rip being quite long; then later that evening there was Ray Finelli, the Columbia grad student conducting the class for her group, yes, cheery Ray telling her the same; then another call from Anne who was obviously excited, it now appeared, that her mother had become the object of such celebrity. Anne called again in the morning when she heard the story about the torn painting and what had happened to her mother being given mention on the morning NPR news, which Hope regularly listened to but was intentionally avoiding when she did get up and begin to prepare her coffee and juice and toast at her usual seven o’clock.

Hope had no caller ID on her one phone, in the living room, but there was a cheap and basic answering machine that Anne had bought for her at Duane Reade a dozen years ago and that Hope often did switch off even when she had no specific problem to deal with and before this happened, wanting to protect her time to read; lately Anne had wanted to buy her a cell phone, but Hope didn’t like the idea of it—too many interruptions when you maybe were, in fact, somewhere trying to relax and read a book. And after a second call came from Anne that morning and then three other calls from various people in the art appreciation class for seniors—Gladys Revotskie and Mary Torrey and Julia Heyman—Hope grew tired of having to explain it all again, telling yet somebody else how she had been assured the damage could be repaired—which had seemed foremost in her own mind while at the hospital, not any question of her health—and also telling whoever was calling how the young intern at Saint Clare’s said it must have happened because she had skipped lunch that day. The intern decided it was a matter of simple blood-sugar level and it could happen to anybody, even somebody his age. She had told him, when asked, that she had eaten some rye crisp, cottage cheese, and a slice of Plumrose ham for lunch at about eleven before she met with her group in the lobby of the Met that afternoon, which was, actually, her normal meal at midday; nevertheless, the cheery young intern, thinking that it was much less than she usually ate, immediately concluded almost with an “Aha!” that she had picked the wrong day to do what he saw as “skip lunch.” Hope herself knew it had had nothing to do with blood-sugar level.

But in a way, not talking on the phone and not being occupied with some conversation was probably worse, because it gave her too much time to think about the incident, let the slow, emphatically full-color reel of it—after all, this was Delacroix—play itself out again on what could have been the big screen of her imagination. Everything had started off normally enough: Hope noticing the usual few yellow school buses parked out front of the Met in the gray of the February day, Hope walking up the long rise of steps and, at the doors, past those glass canisters filled with the little metal entry tabs that they tell you to deposit for recycling on your way out, Hope at the coatroom checking her winter coat with her gloves and knit hat carefully pushed into the pocket, keeping her red handbag in which she had a small pad and pens in case she wanted to take notes, and then Hope meeting the bunch of others from the appreciation class at the far end of the massive lobby by the bookstore. Grinning Ray Finelli in his graduate student’s black jeans and black turtleneck herded them together as if he were a conscientious grade school teacher, Ray laughing, always pleasant, amid all those voices of the many museumgoers echoing around the big white marble pillars and along the lobby’s high white marble walls; it was something Hope always liked, the bustle and palpable excitement of a museum lobby—the anticipation of what’s to come. The lecture from Ray that day was on the nineteenth-century painting in France that had laid the groundwork for the two great movements that eventually marked, as he explained, the latter part of that century—Impressionism and Symbolism. And while they did find themselves in a gallery with dark-green walls showing a half-dozen Corots and Millets, smallish and more or less uniformly murky, the mishap happened when the bunch of them were standing there and listening to Ray talk right in front of the huge and decidedly vivid Delacroix canvas. It was the scene of a sultan and his warriors, in turbans and robes and with the horses’ jeweled, gleaming harnesses and saddles flashing as brightly as the Moors’ scimitars themselves, preparing perhaps for battle in front of the golden walls of a medina; the Moroccan sky was so big and so blue above it all that just to look at it was enough to make you dizzy on its own, near overwhelming in its richness and also its trueness—the essence of something that you really couldn’t name, or probably well beyond naming, which made it that much more, yes, true and rich and, undeniably, an essence. Ray Finelli was still talking, the dozen or so of them were listening attentively, Hope was looking at that blue sky—and the next thing Hope knew everybody was gathered and looking down at her as she lay there tangled like a dropped puppet on the honey parquet floor and against the dark-green wall, finally opening her eyes, blinking. She would later decide that it must have been her elbow that hit the thin, taut canvas and caused the damage on the way down.

Actually, thinking too much about it, she did turn on the answering machine again in hopes that somebody would call, and at four, when Anne’s twin daughters were home from junior high, they took turns on the phone, wanting to make sure themselves that she, “Gram,” was all right; like their mother, they apparently were a bit excited, too, saying they had told all the other kids about it at school and to “check it out” on the Web.

The third day was little different, more calls, including two from reporters. Now that she thought of it, Hope was surprised the reporters hadn’t contacted her earlier; one was from a large New York all-news radio station and one from a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn that Hope admittedly had never heard of. Both reporters sounded quite young and with both she was polite, avoiding making any more comment, and no sooner did she finish with the second call than she answered another ring, Ray Finelli phoning again. He reassured her not to worry, saying once more it was amazing what restorers could do with canvas damage nowadays and emphasizing that the Met, of course, had “humongous insurance” for this kind of thing, not to worry whatsoever; however, he said that at some point she would probably have to file a more complete report with the museum people—he would keep her informed. But by the fourth day the phone had quieted at last, and when it did ring late in the morning she listened to the prerecorded greeting that came with the answering machine say with its packaged, game-show-announcer’s voice, even-toned, “We are not home now” and the rest of it (Anne had explained to Hope even before the museum incident that, for security, it wasn’t a good idea to give as much as your first name or any sort of personal greeting message on a machine); there followed a message with a male’s voice, a little raspy and older-sounding, first saying he hoped he had the right number, and then identifying himself as Dan Sorensen, somebody who, as he said, he hoped that she remembered after so many years. She looked at the little green light on the black phone flashing rhythmically in the course of the message being taken, and she picked up the receiver before he was finished:

“Dan?”

“Hope?”

And they began talking, as naturally as that. She hadn’t heard from Dan Sorensen for who knows how long, it amazingly being close to a full sixty years, they eventually decided with some extended calculation, as they laughed and talked about so many things, Dan explaining that he had seen the news squib and simply looked up her number in the phone book. There was so much to be covered, so much to be talked about, though once the family material got filled in—Hope telling how her husband Norman had died ten years earlier, her one daughter Anne and Anne’s husband the investment banker had two wonderful girls, twins, living in Westchester, and Dan talking of having survived two wives, no children, admitting that probably his work as a civil engineer when younger, with considerable travel to Europe and South America for that work, never let him think about starting a family until it was too late to do so—yes, once all that was out of the way, even the explanation of how Dan himself lived not far from her and on the Upper West Side, had lived there for years after his retirement, everything did return to talk of when they had been boyfriend and girlfriend during their last year in high school. Or, high school for Dan, anyway, and the girls’ Catholic day school on the Upper East Side for Hope—what they used to call an “exclusive” school and run by the Order of the Sacred Heart nuns, originally French.

“You know,” Dan now said, “I knew when you first told me back then that you had decided to go to that even ritzier women’s college, a place with that same order of swank nuns up there in the suburbs, your Manhattanville College, my days were numbered, all right, that it was only a matter of months or even days before you would meet some guy from some place like Harvard.” But then he seemed to question himself on that, an inadvertent addendum: “And it was Harvard for your husband Norman?”

“He went to Yale, actually.”

“I guess I always thought it was Harvard.”

“No, both of Norman’s degrees, for college and then law school, were from Yale.”

“What’s the difference, way out of my league in either case,” Dan laughed, and Hope did, too.

They ended up talking for well over an hour, while neither of them seemed to notice the time, and there was more laughing, more remembering, Hope sitting there in her apartment’s living room and somehow not sitting there whatsoever, just picturing places that came up in the conversation, like a slow slide show, just picturing people and especially picturing Dan—square-jawed and handsome when they had been together when young, his thick mahogany hair carefully parted on one side the way boys groomed their hair back then and the large blue eyes that, true, often made him look perfectly startled, perhaps with life itself; sunburnt Tom in khakis and canvas shoes and a crew-neck sweater, a refreshingly cool summer evening after a fine day at the beach for the two of them out on Long Island in Hope’s precise picturing now—and soon, on the phone, they were agreeing to meet for lunch the next week, that somehow happening without Hope even noticing it, she later told herself.

And all the following weekend Hope also told herself that thinking about Dan now, plus once or twice mentioning him and the upcoming lunch to her daughter Anne, she seemed to forget altogether what had happened in the museum on the gray afternoon less than a full week before. It would be good to see Dan again, which is what Hope kept telling herself that weekend, wondering what Dan looked like today, wondering what he would think she looked like today, wondering about just about everything concerning Dan and probably excited, though she wouldn’t fully admit that. It went on all Saturday and Sunday, right until Monday—when Dan did call again; he was laughing, despite what he had to tell her, sounding boyish and the voice no longer strange or raspy, the way it had been when she had first heard it unidentified on the earlier call and he had begun to leave his message. Dan explained now that he would have to ask for “the old Yankees-game rain check” on the lunch, and the doctor he had seen that very morning wanted him to book into the hospital immediately, Mount Sinai, for some tests: “One thing I forgot to mention when we talked the other day, Hopey”—she wondered when somebody had last called her Hopey? her mother, her own three sisters? all now dead—“I’ve had a lot of problems with my ticker these last few years, they rope me in for these tests all the time. So, a rain check it will be, OK, Hopey?”

“Yes,” Hope said, rather softly, saying repeatedly that she surely hoped it all worked out OK.

Dan Sorensen died during heart surgery at Mount Sinai that Thursday. Hope went to the funeral services at the Catholic church on Columbus Avenue the following Monday, attended by only a dozen people, mostly retired elderly colleagues who had known him from work. But she didn’t go up to the burial at Woodlawn in the Bronx, even though the kind, polite Hispanic priest had offered to let her come with him in his car, saying he could drop her off at her apartment on the way back; she admitted to the young priest that she was quite tired, and he said he understood.

As sorrowful as it had been, she was appreciative that she had at least talked to Dan before he passed away, and she was appreciative that they had shared for at least that hour of phone conversation the memories of other times. And by that spring, April and then May, Hope was back to her routine of reading and spending time with her grandchildren, with the whole idea of her moment of celebrity entirely behind her, that day when she had fallen into the canvas; Hope was looking forward to receiving the printed schedule from Columbia of appreciation courses for seniors for the coming academic year, thinking she might sign up for one in literature this time.

In other words, Hope’s life returned, very much so, to its normal routine, except for the strangest part of it all, the dreams she kept having night after night, it seemed, in which she was always falling into—sometimes tumbling into and sometimes leaning into and sometimes full-fledged being swept along for a collision with the canvas about to tear—Hope falling into so many paintings of so many artists she did know because their work was very famous—falling into Monet’s feathery pastels and those giant water lilies, and falling into Whistler’s obliquely named “Symphonies” and “Nocturnes,” and, almost humorously, it seemed, falling into Grant Wood’s stony-faced Iowa farmer and his wife, pitchfork held upright like a staff, several Mondrians and Picassos, too—and also falling into paintings she had never known or never heard of, with such a variety of frames encasing them, all of which Hope seemed to remember from the dreams, distinctly, those frames, some frilled gold and ornate, some brushed stainless steel and starkly minimal, and who could calculate just how many paintings all told— and Hope perpetually falling.

In the morning Hope, having her coffee and juice and toast, would try to recall which paintings they were, what exactly it was she had fallen into this time, if, in fact, she had had another dream like that the night before.

On the other hand, maybe Hope didn’t think of any such dreaming whatsoever (had she actually once fallen into that big, vivid Delacroix canvas of swashbuckling Moorish warriors atop their fine steeds that winter day at the Met? did anybody ever actually fall into a painting as she had, literally, and had there been the odd few days of celebrity for Hope that February before, then the whole even more odd business of the call out of the blue from Dan Sorensen after all these years? had that happened? or had that been a dream, too? she wasn’t so sure anymore), no, maybe she didn’t think of any of it any longer, and it was merely a matter of Hope knowing more than ever now what she had already come to quietly accept.

Because it was true—Hope was getting close.