I meant to apologize but found myself syllabically stranded. You could have fit a shoebox in my gaping mouth. Pulses don’t get out much in general, and I certainly have never been much with the ladies. I’m not deformed or anything, I’m just more accustomed to talking to paint-and-canvas women than flesh-and-blood ones. The last time I even dared to use a line on a girl I was seventeen. I had spent three months nursing a crush on this teller at the drive-thru when I finally pulled up to her window and, with all the sunglasses-on-nosepoint suavity I could muster, said, “I would like to make one withdrawal and one deposit, please.” “Yes?” she said, sounding bored. “I want to withdraw you from the banker’s box and deposit you in a restaurant with me, tonight. Say sevenish?”

It worked, believe it or not, but the night ended in failure. On her front step, the door cracked open invitationally behind her, she leaned into me, her beaded lashes louvering her eyes, her lips parted and pliant,¹² and I didn’t get it. I could read every single freaking optotype on the eleventh line of a Snellen test at fifty freaking feet but I could not read, at point-blank range, these signs, these obvious, guileless signs. I didn’t even get it when she asked if I wanted to come inside to “see her coin roller.” At that critical doorstep moment—a moment every teenaged boy dreams about—as she turned and went inside, looking at me over her shoulder and giving me a walk that she didn’t learn at Miss Porter’s, I said, “Nah, I’ve got a first period tomorrow. I’d better go. I’ll call you later.”

That was how shrewd, how slick, how perceptive I was.

Or maybe: am.

And then just ten years later, at the Frick, in front of my Boucher, there I was with this incredible woman, experiencing a massive sensory overload. Olfactory cues and visual stimuli were cauterizing my brain—a dim part of me kept wondering how I had not heard her behind me—and I was unable to formulate a comprehensible sentence of introduction. “Hello,” I could have said. Or “Nice day for a museum visit.” Even “Do you like art?” would have been preferable to the stunned, saucer-mouthed silence. But language was beyond me. I felt mesmerized and arrested, as if viewing my own car wreck. I was lockjawed—don’t laugh; it’s true—with a vision of pure love.

Another, competing feeling was a bolt of dread; i.e., “I’ve been staring at her for a long five silent seconds and if I don’t say something soon she may walk away from me and never come back.”

It grieves me to report that I did not conquer this fear. I remained mute. But someone else wasn’t afraid, and he might have just saved my whole life. A homeless guy clothed partially in the patched skin of a ruined umbrella and sporting several wool hats teetering on his head in a nesting, Russian-doll fashion approached Charlie and held up an empty 8‘ × 10‘ picture frame to her face.