“That was her approach. But she wasn’t, really.” It came to him why he had wanted them to meet, to touch each other: he was proud of knowing both of them, both these women. Until Julia, he had only known growing girls.

NEW YORK GIRL

In those days New York seemed as far from Buffalo as Singapore does now. I used to take the train, all eight stultifying hours of it, or drive, on Route 17, stopping off in Corning and Binghamton, where we had clients, and then coming down through the Catskills into Westchester County. I used to stay at the Roosevelt or the Biltmore, easy walks with a suitcase from Grand Central Station. Once you were in New York, you were on another planet, a far shore; it cried out for you to establish another life. Time, at home so filled with the needs of the house and of the children and of the wife—Carole kept counting her gray hairs, and childbearing had given her varicose veins—time was here your own, hours of it, and no one told you how to fill it, once the day’s appointments had been kept. Extruded nonferrous metal, mainly aluminum alloy, was our product. Combination storm-window manufacturers were our big customers, but in the Sixties a sideline had developed in metal picture frames, and this brought me into contact with the lower echelons of the art world. I visited galleries to see what they needed, and in one of them, on an upper floor on West Fifty-seventh Street, I met Jane.

She wasn’t plain, but she wasn’t a conventional beauty either. There was something asymmetrical about her; not just her smile but her whole bony face, with its high cheekbones and powdered-over freckles, seemed a little tugged to one side. When she gestured, her arms and hands appeared too long, with an extra hinge to them somewhere. Her gestures involved a lot of sudden retraction and self-stroking, as if she were checking herself for loose parts. She kept flipping back her long ironed hair, a dull reddish color that reminded me of pencil shavings and the cedary fragrance that arises when you empty the sharpener. She wore a beige knit minidress and black pantyhose; her hips were wider and her thighs fuller than one would have expected from the bony top half of her body, and this added to her touching aura of being out of kilter, there in the merciless brightness of the display space. The white walls held hasty abstractions, blue pigments smeared upon white-primed canvas, all the same size and framed in thin cold-rolled steel, like a row of bathroom mirrors.

“I’m not here to look at the paintings,” I apologized. “Just the frames. To get an idea of what you need.”