“I guess inconspicuous is what we need,” she said, fluttering one long hand at the cruel wall and then quickly resting the same hand on the ball of her shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “A lot of the artists can’t stand any frames, they say it creates a mind-set, they want it to look rough, and are fighting the rectangle in any case. But we find,” she said, relenting with a heart-catching crooked smile, “the customers are reassured if there’s a frame. It shows it’s finished; the artist means it.”

“I’m interested more in the flanges,” I said, but she knew already that I was interested in her. I had gone stupid; a mist of a kind had arisen between us. In those benighted days such an interest was considered not an affront but a datum, to be factored into whatever one’s life equation was at the time. Jane and I were both in our early thirties, a time for fresh calculations. Back in Buffalo I had survived, with my family, a tumultuous infatuation and an explosive dénouement; in the aftermath I had adjusted downward my estimate of how much happiness I could extract from the world, and of how much I could offer any woman not my wife. I was wised-up and shy. But, then, New York was another world—an infinity of restaurants and apartments and elevator shafts and human appetites. I wasn’t due home until late tomorrow night.

“For the flanges,” Jane said, after a gawky hesitation and an alarmed stare that for a second burned through the mist, “you maybe need to come into the storage room.” There, in a crammed but not totally disorderly clutter of unframed art and unassembled frames, of T-squares and knives and a scarred worktable, we sat on tippy tall stools and each smoked a cigarette.

“What do you do, Stan?”

I described my job, as a would-be engineer turned salesman of alloy extrusions. I described my eight-room house, my three-child family, my two-car garage in Eggertsville, and the new red Toro snow-blower with which I tried to keep a path open through the fabled snows off Lake Erie. “Now tell me about you.”

She smoked like someone who had never smoked before, bringing the cigarette to her lips with a flattened hand, the fingers tensely curved backward. She stabbed out the butt in a clunky green ashtray as if she were crushing a stubbornly vital insect. “No time for that, sweetie,” she said, dismounting from the stool with an awkward hop. Her shoes at the end of her long full-thighed legs were a startling shiny scarlet, like red nails on black fingers. “I hear people out front. Maybe they’re stealing the art. I should go encourage them.” She added, “I have a child, too. A nine-year-old boy. No husband, no car, no snow-blower, but a dear hopeful child.”