That was not all.
(Things, with her own groom, beginning to go so depressingly, irretrievably south during that same summer; that had not helped matters either, although it had also, arguably, been completely beside the point. Catherine M. Reilly, a daughter of Patricia M. Reilly and Charlie F. Reilly of Longford, Ireland, and Lucien F. Gordon, the son of Appalled Alexandra A. Gordon and Flare-Nostriled Thomas E. Gordon of Lancashire, et cetera, et cetera, were married Saturday and separated Monday, or near enough as makes no difference…)
“Oh no, not really,” Catherine said to Ashley now, with an apologetic wince. “I mean, I know of him, but Ireland’s funny like that. You’d be surprised the way that with some people, your paths never cross.”
“Oh, I can really hear your accent now,” said Ashley, staring at Catherine’s mouth in seeming wonder.
“Ha.”
“Well, anyway, if you’re interested, there’s a big Flynn in the Greene booth across the way,” Ashley said, pointing to the booth opposite, which was equally spacious, equally well-appointed, and equally equipped with a young blond assistant and a Russian bank vault’s worth of pieces. “I really like it, actually, though I’m not always sure about his work.”
“Oh, I know what you mean,” Catherine said, and with a smile and a thank you, she said goodbye.
* * *
The glass-walled auditorium in the center of the tent was full to capacity for the criticism panel. That was down to the participation of Hal Foster and Roberta Smith, though Dan Franks had his own groupies, too, Catherine suspected, and she noticed that when Foster or Smith spoke, there was respectful silence, contributions from Franks set a restless sort of charge ticking in the room, not the kind which made people want to get up and leave, but the kind which made them want to stand up and demand to hear more. Franks was in his late thirties, and was the founding editor of Mauve, a quarterly magazine dedicated to the crossover of contemporary art and fashion, the art content of which consisted partly of unsigned, notoriously snipey reviews, but mostly of photo essays of beautiful girls lying naked and spread-eagled across rusted fire escapes in Bushwick and long, possibly ketamine-fueled Q&As with high-end photographers or artists who had connections to the designers whose ads comprised most of the rest of the magazine. Though this was unfair, Catherine reflected now, half listening as Franks defended the particularly savage review of the Lucas Borga show which had run in Mauve’s winter issue; the magazine had alerted her to the existence of countless younger artists she would never have found out about from the pages of Artforum or indeed Frieze, much less The New Yorker or the New York Times.
Under her blazer, the short sleeves of her silk blouse were soaked through with sweat; she widened her elbows a little more on the table in an attempt to distract herself from the discomfort, and prayed that Foster, beside her, was too caught up in his evident bemusement by Franks to notice any odor there happened to be. She looked down at her notes—Maintaining Independence, Making Decisions, Dangers of Celebrification, Pissing People Off, one of her checklists read, and she underlined the last and began to mentally prepare a follow-up question for Smith, bouncing off of Franks’s remarks, when her gaze, floating languidly over the audience as she chewed over the words enemy and adversary, seemed, all at once, in the same moment, to clamp down and yet swerve maniacally. The room was not spinning, but slamming off of itself, like a rubber ball off a set of narrow walls, and she blinked as his face came into focus and then into yet another focus that was so sharp, so visceral, that the first instant of focus seemed only some kind of dreamlike meandering — and he was not looking at her, but now he was, and the eyebrow lift and half-smile he gave her before turning his attention back to Franks was as shocking to her, as much of a jolt to her whole being, as though he had stood up and somehow sung out her name.
Beside her, Foster cleared his throat, and Catherine realized that she had let hang onstage a moment of awkward, unshepherded silence, and into the microphone she let slip an awkward, unshepherded sound: the exhalation of someone who has just been obliged to run up several flights of stairs. Foster looked at her with an inquiring smile, and she turned to him with the follow-up question that was specific only to the coverage of the Times, and he took it like the fuck-up it was, and he babysat it for a while and then he handed it, smoothed out and newly layered, on to Smith, and by the time it came back to Catherine, ready to become the segue that would bring the whole discussion to a close, she had determined two things: firstly, that the audience was not a thing that needed to be looked at again, not even glanced at, not even during the long questions-from-the-audience part of the event which she would now have to moderate, and secondly, that her new Isabel Marant blouse was now ruined beyond repair.
* * *
The cheerfulness with which she would bestow her greeting would be immense. The warmth would be like a late-evening sun. The affection would be clearly of old, and deep-seated, and barely needing words, even, to settle its amber glow on the heavy air between them, and her smile would be so easy, so natural, and yet so full of knowledge, so full of understanding, of the things that had never been spoken, of the years that had marched through them, and over them, uninterested in the nature of their participation, uninterested in the way it had fallen apart like wet paper, their bond—
(Not wet paper. A tear. A craft knife, its triangular blade down a strip of cardboard, cleaving it so neatly, with such apparent symmetry, the trace of the wound visible even on the surface beneath the space where the parts had joined—)
So many times she had visualized it, dreamed it: their meeting again. At such moments, in such places that she was often ashamed, felt almost diseased with guilt at her own thoughts; even walking up the aisle to Lucien, she had imagined it: his smiling, well-wishing face in the crowd. Only a flash, only the fraction of a moment, but still, it had been there. Yet such moments were uncontrolled; when she daydreamed, when she steered and directed her reveries, they were like this: she saw James first, in enough time to get a hold of herself, get a hold of her face and the expression in her eyes, before he saw her. Thus composed, thus arranged, she would be waiting, and in the street — it was always Dublin, it was always Wicklow Street, for some reason, within view of watching, fascinated people in the window of Cornucopia or one of the other restaurants — when he turned, or when his face, lost in thought, registered the trace of her, the whisper of her, the first, freighted sighting, around them the traffic of cars and shoppers would seem to hush and to become a gentle blur, and they two, two friends, two lost ones, two people who had once again found one another, would stare—
“Hi!” Catherine said instead now, almost squawked it, like a person hanging helplessly out of an upstairs window, having to attract help from below. “Hi, hi!”
“Hi, hi,” James said, a deliberate — probably, yes, mocking — echo, as he leaned in, with that same half-smile, and kissed her lightly, quickly, on each cheek. She lifted her arms, jerked her body forward, for a hug, but he was already straightening up again, so she pulled herself back, and staggered a little, her lips moving too much, too madly, a stiffness already at the base of her skull as she gazed up at him. Had he always been so tall? Well, yes. You did not grow in your twenties. Not physically; not upwards.