I didn’t remember dialing the rest of her number and didn’t hear the phone ring but there was Ann’s voice. “Hello?” She always said it as a question, a secret, slightly embarrassing question.
“It’s me,” I said. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t recognize my voice. “I’m twenty-five feet away from your house. Can I come up? Or would you like to go out for coffee?”
There was silence on her end of the line. I heard classical music in the background and a police car siren that was just then racing north past me, throwing its stuttering red light against the glass of the phonebooth. “Is this who I think it is?” Ann finally said. Her voice was casual. I knew she recognized me and the lack of emotion in her voice both disappointed and reassured me. Clearly, she was not about to weep with joy over my appearance, but neither was she treating me like some armored insect found beneath a rock.
“Can I come up?” I said. “I just came in today. I’m staying at a hotel. I’d like to see you. We can talk.”
“I’ve been having so many visitors,” Ann said. “Keith’s been camping out on the sofa.”
“He’s there now?”
“No, he went home this morning.”
“Can I come to see you, Ann?”
She paused for a moment. “If you like,” she said. She waited an instant for my reply and then hung up.
I went back to her building, rang her bell, and Ann buzzed me in. A small wood-paneled elevator took me to the seventh floor. A conventional sense of anticipation told me I should be busy imagining what it would be like to finally be with Ann, or what I would say, but the future stood with its back to me, warning me not to even try to look in its face. The elevator stopped with a slight lurch and I stepped into a wide hall—white ceiling, faded pink walls, brightly polished black floors. Ann’s apartment was at the very end. The door was freshly painted white and the doorknob was intricately textured lead, round and as large as a croquet ball. I knocked and waited. There was a knot in my leg muscle, painful I suppose, but I barely noticed; it rose through me like a bubble up the stem of a syringe. I knocked again and finally there was the sound of Ann’s footsteps.
She was dressed in a floor-length pale green robe, bordered in a darker green, with those medieval hanging sleeves. Her dark hair was pulled back and she looked at me through large, faintly tinted eyeglasses. She smelled of perfume and her painted toenails poked out of gold-braided slippers. In one hand she held a copy of Ariel by Sylvia Plath and her other hand was clamped on her hip. She looked totally self-possessed.
“You know I don’t like surprises,” Ann said. “And you won’t stop surprising me.” She didn’t ask me in but she moved to the side so I came forward. We were in a long, narrow corridor. The walls were covered with prints and drawings, including a Dutch railway poster that used to hang in the second-floor hallway on Dorchester, between Ann and Hugh’s bedroom and Sammy’s. That it had survived the fire amazed me.
“You still have this,” I said, gesturing toward the poster—it showed a Peter Lorre-ish man opening the door of an olive- colored railway car.
“No. It’s not the same one. I found it in an antique store on Second Avenue. One hundred and fifty dollars. I starved for a month but I wanted it.”
The hall got lighter as I walked toward the front of Ann’s apartment, and when I was in the living room the light was almost overwhelming. The entire south wall was casement windows and most of the west wall was glass as well. The bamboo shades were raised and Ann had hung small prisms that dangled on thin threads and blazed red and green as sunlight passed through them. The floors were wooden and bare. There was a white sofa and three director’s chairs grouped around a glass- topped table. Off to one side of the room was a small yellow desk, such as you might find in a college dorm. A red manual typewriter and an open box of typing paper. Bookshelves, mostly empty. It was hard to say where the kitchen was, or if it even existed. Perhaps behind the closed double doors.
“Where should I sit?” I said.
“Assuming you should,” she said.
“Yes. Assuming.”
“Why don’t you look out the windows first? I like to show my view when newcomers arrive.”
The view was of a series of slate peaks, the roof of a church. The black slate looked liquid in the sunlight. Beyond the church was a tall white stone and glass loft building with scallop shells and coats of arms carved in beneath each tier of windows. A photographer’s strobe flashed like summer lightning from the top floor. Ann stood next to me; she’d always liked showing things to people and then trying to see the familiar through new eyes. Long strands of down stood up on her cheekbones, caught in the light. I felt the beginnings of an overpowering shyness in myself.
Ann glided across the room and sat on the white sofa, drawing her feet up and leaning her chin onto her open palm.
“It’s nice here,” I said. “Your new home.”
“Three hundred and ten dollars and eight cents a month,” she said. “For this, a pullman kitchen, and a small bedroom. It’s insane. I’m always broke. A friend has a place on the West Side, six enormous rooms, for less than I’m paying here. But I’m too timid to live on the West Side. It’s so ridiculous, but that’s how I was raised, to be afraid to live on the West Side. Do you know Mother used to make a point of telling people she hadn’t been west of Fifth Avenue in twenty years? ‘I went to hear that Jewish violinist at Carnegie Hall. My, what an adventure that was.’” Ann laughed, shortly. “But oh if only we’d had the dough to justify our little eccentricities. But without money it was all so stupid and awkward, like chimpanzees dressed up in formal gowns.”
“Ann…”
“Sitting at little toy pianos.”
“Ann,” I said, “do you mind if I sit down?”
She pointed to one of the director’s chairs. “Brand new,” she said.
“Tell me if you want me to leave,” I said.
Ann shook her head. “You’re still doing it? Still giving people permission to say what’s on their mind?”
I sat down. The chair seemed to give a little beneath me and its fragility made me feel huge, clumsy, and potentially destructive.
“If there’s one thing wonderful about you—I mean, just one—it’s that I can say anything at all to you, David, and never have to feel the slightest degree of guilt.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Not only now but always.”
We sat in silence. I wanted to look directly into Ann’s eyes but I knew she found that sort of gesture more pressuring than frank. (“People invade your privacy as if they were helping you overcome a fault.”) I fixed my gaze on a section of quilt, blue and pink pyramids in a row, burned at the edges, and hanging above Ann in a rough wooden frame.
“Look familiar?” Ann asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s from the house. Maybe we weren’t using it during your tenure. It’s part of a quilt—all that’s left of it—Grandmother gave me when I set off for Bryn Mawr. Very sentimental. I’ve been defending it like the Grail these past couple years. From Keith. I told you Keith just left here, didn’t I? Yesterday.”
“Is Keith still the Butterfield historian?” My voice cracked slightly.
“Of course. He brings a portable tape recorder on his visits now and attempts to interview me. I feel like a perfect idiot speaking into the microphone. Immortality without revision? Who needs it?”
I felt my cheeks go hot. Every word she said made her more familiar to me and I was struck with the image of myself falling to my knees before Ann and pressing her hand to my lips—a knight returned to his Queen.