When one person asked, “What do you think?” I was tempted to say that it needed a little milk.
As I kept walking, only one artist’s work gave me real pause. I stopped at a painting of a small cottage on top of a hill. There was a soft morning glow hitting the side-the pinkness that comes with the first light of day. I couldn’t tell you why but it choked me up. Maybe it was the dark windows, as though the cottage had once been warm but it was abandoned now. I don’t know. But I stood in front of the painting and felt lost and moved. I stepped slowly from one painting to the next. They all delivered a blow of some kind. Some made me melancholy. Some made me nostalgic, whimsical, passionate. None left me indifferent.
I will spare you the “big reveal” that the paintings were done by Natalie.
A woman was smiling at my reaction. “Do you like them?”
“Very much,” I said. “Are you the artist?”
“Heavens no. I run the bakery and coffee shop in town.” She offered me her hand. “They call me Cookie.”
I shook it. “Wait. Cookie runs a bakery?”
“Yeah, I know. Too precious, right?”
“Maybe a tad.”
“The artist is Natalie Avery. She’s right over there.”
Cookie pointed to the woman with the sunglasses.
“Oh,” I said.
“Oh what?”
With the sunglasses-indoors look, I had her pegged as the creator of Breakfast in America. Lars had just finished his reading. The crowd gave him a small golf-clap, but Lars, sporting an ascot, bowed as though it were a thunderous standing ovation.
Everyone quickly rose except for Natalie. The man with the beard and curly hair whispered something to her as he stood, but still she didn’t move. She stayed with her arms crossed, still lost, it seemed, in the essence of Hitler’s dog.
I approached her. She looked right through me.
“The cottage in your painting. Where is it?”
“Huh?” she said, startled. “Nowhere. What painting?”
I frowned. “Aren’t you Natalie Avery?”
“Me?” She seemed befuddled by the question. “Yeah, why?”
“The painting of the cottage. I really loved it. It… I don’t know. It moved me.”
“Cottage?” She sat up, took off the sunglasses, and rubbed her eyes. “Sure, right, a cottage.”
I frowned again. I was not sure what reaction I expected, but something a bit more demonstrative than this. I looked down at her. Sometimes I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer but when she rubbed her eyes again, the realization hit me.
“You were sleeping!” I said.
“What?” she said. “No.”
But she rubbed her eyes some more.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s why you’re wearing the sunglasses. So no one can tell.”
“Shh.”
“You were sleeping this whole time!”
“Keep it down.”
She finally looked up at me and I remembered thinking that she had a beautiful, sweet face. I would soon learn that Natalie had what I’d call a slow beauty, the kind you don’t really notice at first and then it knocks you back and grows on you and she gets more beautiful every time you see her and then you can’t believe that you ever thought that she was anything less than completely stunning. Whenever I saw her, my entire body reacted, as though it were the first time or better.
“Was I that obvious?” she asked in a whisper.
“Not at all,” I said. “I just thought you were being a pretentious ass.”
She arched an eyebrow. “What better disguise to blend in with this crowd?”
I shook my head. “And I thought you were a genius when I saw your paintings.”
“Really?” She seemed caught off guard by the compliment.
“Really.”
She cleared her throat. “And now that you see how deceptive I can be?”
“I think you’re a diabolical genius.”
Natalie liked that. “You can’t fault me. That Lars guy is like human Ambien. He opens his mouth, I’m out.”
“I’m Jake Fisher.”
“Natalie Avery.”
“So do you want to grab a cup of coffee, Natalie Avery? Looks like you could use one.”
She hesitated, studying my face to the point where I think I started to redden. She tucked a ringlet of black hair behind her ear and stood. She moved closer to me, and I remember thinking that she was wonderfully petite, smaller than I had imagined when she’d been sitting. She looked way up at me, and a smile slowly came to her face. It was, I must say, a great smile. “Sure, why not?”
That image of that smile held in my brain for a beat before it mercifully dissolved away.
I was out at the Library Bar with Benedict. The Library Bar was pretty much exactly that-an old, dark-wood campus library that had recently been converted into a retro-trendy drinking establishment. The owners were clever enough to change very little of the old library. The books were still on the oak shelves, sorted in alphabetical order or the Dewey Decimal System or whatever the librarians had used. The “bar” was the old circulation desk. The coasters were old card files that had been laminated. The lights were green library lamps.
The young female bartenders wore their hair in severe buns and sported fitted conservative clothes and, of course, horn-rimmed glasses. Yep, the fantasy librarian hottie. Once an hour, a loud librarian shush would play over the loudspeaker and the bartenders would rip off their glasses, let loose their bun, and unbutton the top of their blouse.
Cheesy but it worked.
Benedict and I were getting properly oiled. I threw my arm loosely around him and leaned in close. “You know what we should do?” I asked him.
Benedict made a face. “Sober up?”
“Ha! Good one. No, no. We should set up a rousing tournament of condom roulette. Single elimination. I’m thinking sixty-four teams. Like our own March Madness.”
“We aren’t in Barsolotti’s, Jake. This place doesn’t have a condom vending machine.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No.”
“Shame.”
“Yeah,” Benedict said. Then he whispered, “Pair of red-hot spank-worthy honeys at three o’clock.”
I was about to turn to my left, then to my right, and suddenly the concept of three o’clock made no sense to me. “Wait,” I said, “where’s my twelve o’clock again?”
Benedict sighed. “You’re facing twelve o’clock.”
“So three o’clock would be…?”
“Just turn to your right, Jake.”
You may have guessed that I do not handle spirits well. This surprises people. When they see someone my size, they expect me to drink smaller folks under the table. I can’t. I hold my liquor about as well as a freshman coed at her first mixer.
“Well?”
I knew the type before my eyes even had a chance to settle on them. There sat two blondes who looked good-to-great in low Library Bar light and ordinary-to-frightful in the light of the morning sun. Benedict slid toward them and started chatting them up. Benedict could chat up a file cabinet. The two women looked past him and at me. Benedict signaled for me to join them.
Why the hell not?
You made a promise.
Damn straight I did. Thanks for the reminder. Might as well keep it and try to score me a honey, right? I weaved my way toward them.
“Ladies, meet the legendary Professor Jacob Fisher.”
“Wow,” one of the blondes said, “he’s a big boy,” and-because Benedict couldn’t help but be obvious-he winked and said, “You got no idea, sweetheart.”
I bit back the sigh, said hello, and sat. Benedict “macked” on them with pickup lines, specifically handpicked for this bar: “It’s a library so it’s perfectly okay to check you out.” “Will I be fined if I keep you out late?” The blondes loved it. I tried to join in, but I have never been great with superficial banter. Natalie’s face kept appearing. I kept pushing it away. We ordered more drinks. And more.