At some moment, today, tomorrow, the next day, Dempsey would give him a simple yes, a simple no, probably without preface, certainly without explanation. Meantime, he would leave her to herself, knowing she was, even as they stood there, hard at work.
The light changed. They crossed the street, barely escaping a Jeep Wrangler making a right turn. When they got to the other side, Johnny cupped his hand under Dempsey’s elbow.
“Careful. You’re grabbing,” she said.
“I like to grab.”
“In that case, okay.”
She reached over and pulled his hand under her elbow and placed it along her arm. She pressed her own arm closer to her side, a quick squeeze to signal acceptance. Johnny felt, for the moment the squeeze lasted, the soft give of her breast, then the release—charged with the possibility that it could happen again. He surrendered to euphoria. He was walking down the street, arm in arm with Dempsey Coates. More than this he asked neither of heaven nor of earth. This, even more than their lovemaking, made him feel that history had fulfilled itself in their union. Toward this moment all happenings had tended; the past had no purpose but to provide and prepare for this. It was only Dempsey’s hold that kept him bound to earth, that prevented his immediate assumption into the skies.
The gallery was crowded. It was on the ground floor but Johnny didn’t doubt that Dempsey would have had trouble with a few flights of stairs. She had spent the entire walk gawking, checking the sky as if for messages, staring into shop windows, interested in whatever wares were on display: shoes, toys, lamps, books, magazines. It seemed that she wanted to make sure the items were there in their places, where they belonged and could be found whenever she might have need of them. Then she’d move on. At the Vesuvio Bakery on Prince Street, her head jerking like a bird’s from one kind of bread to another, she made Johnny go inside and buy a round loaf while she continued to take inventory outside. He held it out to her, unwrapped. Without saying anything, she sniffed it, then stuck it in the tote bag, not caring that some of the flour was brushed off onto the knitting.
The only difficult moment came when they passed a deserted warehouse. Dempsey had stopped and looked at a metal door leading to an outside passageway. Razor wire was rolled over the top of the door. When Johnny had asked why she was stopping, she explained that, for a moment, she had thought that this was the Lunch Room. Then she remembered that the Lunch Room was farther downtown, almost in her own neighborhood.
She had explained to Johnny that the Lunch Room was where she had gone to get her drugs. One day Dempsey had pointed it out to him during one of their walks: the iron door, the rolled razor wire. She told him about the spiffy clientele, about her own participation in its revels. When they had turned the corner, a man in a linen suit, light blue shirt, slant-striped tie, and soft leather shoes was coming toward them. When he came closer, there was the slightest break in the rhythm of Dempsey’s step. Johnny knew where the man was going. And he knew that the man and Dempsey had “done” lunch together.
The guests in the gallery for Winnie’s opening were dressed in varying hues of drab. Outright black, the preferred statement of recent times, was only intermittently represented. If any color threatened to be vibrant or assertive, it had been pitilessly bleached or faded. Blues had become grays, reds were tan, greens another shade of gray, and yellows drained to what could only be called dirty. Maybe there had been a fear that the clothing might distract from the hair. The man with green hair, the woman with purple, didn’t count. Fashion had left them behind. Most of the women had had their hair twisted and tormented into long and skinny corkscrew strands inspired, it seemed, by the snakes of the Medusa or the tails of some very scrawny pigs. And now some of the men, the younger ones, had taken up the cause. Uncombed was hardly a new idea, but this was not uncombed. This hair had obviously been treated with some substance that would not let it rest. It must tangle with itself, it must spring out and away from the ear as if fearing contagion, it must, on the top, be a nest built by a drunken wren, and most of all, the hair must be black. It must be blacker than black, stopping just this side of purple. The old black garments had found, perhaps, their lost expression splayed out from the scalp, its source the brain itself, that lobe which nourishes vanity in all its guises.
The talk was small bites of chatter, like the sound of someone munching crackers. “Mingle,” Dempsey said. “You in front, me in back. And get some wine if you want. None for me. And tell the bartender to hide the tote. I don’t want anyone to know I knit. Of course, they might think it’s you. That I wouldn’t mind. But do what you want. There’s Winnie.” Dempsey twisted her way through the crowd, turning in one direction, then another, her hips leading the way.
There, indeed, was Winnie—tall and of a certain amplitude, with long lightly waved hair streaming down past her shoulders. She was wearing a gauzy tan dress with floppy sleeves and a shawl or a veil or whatever it might be thrown over her left shoulder and caught in the crook of her right arm. It was Winnie’s way to drape herself, and only the day’s heat must have persuaded her to limit her swathing. Even so, the light material of her dress and her shawl floated and flowed around her considerable bulk like admiring attendants, touching her, withdrawing, returning to whisper again and again reassurances of her beauty, of her delicacy, of the sweetness of her enviable flesh.
Dempsey had made her way through the throng. She and Winnie were kissing each other on both cheeks, once with the nose and once with the mouth. Johnny decided it was time to look at the paintings.
To his surprise, they were astonishing, and beautiful. Winnie knew how to see. And more than see. Each painting seemed the creation and fulfillment of its own universe, a core of color expanding outward, widening into new and ever more vibrant color. Each painting a searching, a yearning ever outward into infinity. In the beginning was not only light; there was color. And he would never have known that if Winnie hadn’t told him. Why had he not appreciated her work before? Was it because, after having been granted permission to marry Dempsey in a Catholic ceremony, he was now in some kind of altered state of consciousness?
The woman Johnny found to mingle with was named Bianca. She had smooth dark skin in which Johnny could actually detect a tinge of green. He’d often heard of olive-colored skin, but to make the concept applicable he’d had to assume—until now—that the olives were black or dark brown. Now he realized they might actually be green. Bianca, no doubt about it, had olive- colored skin and it seemed entirely right: only the Mediterranean sky, the Mediterranean soil could have produced the flesh that softly rounded her cheeks; only the Mediterranean sun could have trained those eyelids to raise themselves no more than half way.
“Those beautiful animals in the morning light,” Bianca was saying, “the backstretch, you can hardly see it in the morning mist, the horses not racing, just running, cantering, exercising, appearing out of the mist, disappearing into it, and you sit there near the rail and have your coffee. Magical.”
She was describing breakfast at the Saratoga track, which was right next door to an artists’ retreat she’d gone to the previous August. This, he knew, was her way of assuring him that she was sensitive, susceptible to nature’s glories.
“Only one thing you have to watch out for,” she continued. “You have to be careful who you go with. It’s so beautiful, so stirring, that whoever you go with, you’re going to fall in love.” Her smile tightened. “I know,” she whispered. “One morning I went all by myself and it worked. I could hardly keep my hands off for a week.”