In May, Gloria comes to New York to oversee an installation at a celebrated art gallery, and she insists on taking me out to lunch. I have not seen my older sister since the funeral. She looks much the same, though her edges are harder now, polished by her continued success in life, and most noticeably, her luxurious long hair, the pride of her adolescence, is gone, replaced by a severe rectangular cut that makes her look like a Modigliani portrait. The restaurant where we meet (she is ten minutes late, talking on her phone as she enters at a swishing, clicking stride) is much more expensive than anything I could now afford and much more fashionable than anything I ever cared to frequent; I am humbled by its black-and-white minimalism. Gloria, too, is dressed all in black and white, as though she chose the establishment solely to match her sense of style—and knowing my sister, I would guess that is just what she did. We sit at a tiny table, and shyly I pick at my three or four sprigs of some exotic herb crowned by flowers and arranged with flawless precision in the center of an enormous, barren plate, while Gloria talks of the early days of the feminist avant-garde movement, of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper reimagined with women as the apostles, of modern technology influencing art… And as I watch her red lips move, watch her black-and-white gestures multiplied by the mirrors, I catch myself puzzling over something. We have never been particularly close—even as a child, I found her formidable ways intimidating—but the lasting chill in our adult relationship, I realize now, has been mainly of my own making, caused by the offense I took at her behavior during my long-ago wedding. She wore a sour look throughout the ceremony, and later, when her turn came in the receiving line, she spoke to me out of the corner of her mouth and spoke to my groom not at all; she never even said “Congratulations.” For years, I believed her to have been envious of me, of my brilliant match.
Now, I am not so sure.
“Gloria, what did you have against my marriage?” I blurt out when she pauses to take a sip of her martini.
She raises one elegant eyebrow. There is something of a bird of prey in the spare grace of her movements.
“Let’s just say, I did not think you two were a suitable match.” She waves her hand, and I follow the bright red trajectory of her glittering nails. A baby-faced waitress materializes by our table. “Another martini, my dear,” Gloria says, lightly touching her finger to the waitress’s bare arm, then shifts her gaze back to me. “You were too young. Too young to know yourself properly. Too young to know your fiancé properly. When I was that age, I didn’t even know what I liked.”
“What you liked?”
The waitress sails back across the black-and-white room with the new martini, swinging her hips, and a dozen more waitresses float through the mirrors on all sides of us, their eyes obliquely meeting the eyes of Gloria’s manifold reflections.
“Shortly after your wedding,” Gloria says, raising her fresh drink to her lips, “I met someone. A prince much like yours. Handsome, rich, all the right parts in all the right places. He wanted to marry me. But something felt wrong, so I just kept saying, ‘Perhaps,’ and ‘Let’s talk about it next month,’ and ‘Maybe after I’m done with my studies next year,’ and ‘Let me just settle into my job first.’ Eventually he got angry, tricked me into a tower, and, once I was inside, walled the door shut. For weeks, I sat by the only window, high off the ground, and his servants used pulleys to deliver my food so I wouldn’t starve, but I was allowed to talk to no one, to see no one—and every Sunday, right as clockwork, he would come to my window and shout: ‘Will you marry me now?’ And then I was angry, too, so there were no more ‘Maybe’ and ‘Later.’ I would just scream ‘No!’ down at him, and he would stride away in a huff.”
She pats her dramatic red mouth with a napkin, and immediately the waitress appears by her elbow. “I’ll bring you a fresh one,” a dozen waitresses promise breathlessly in a dozen mirrors. We wait for her to deposit another white paper square on the table, wait for her to walk away.
“Gloria, I had no idea… But you didn’t marry him, did you?”
“Of course not. The very thought!”
“How, then, did you get out?”
“Well. Since you ask. One of the prince’s servants and I fell in love. We figured out a way to see each other. Remember when my hair was really long? If I let it down from the tower window, it would touch the ground, and she could climb up to me. In time, she managed to smuggle in a rope ladder, and I escaped. We escaped together.”
“Sorry.” It has taken a few moments to filter through. “She?”
Gloria smiles at me, indulgently.
“All part of growing up, baby girl,” she says, enunciating as though speaking to a child. “Figuring out what you like. What you are. Which—in spite of being almost forty years old, you know—is something you still need to do, in my opinion.”
“Oh.” I feel as though I have accidentally walked in on my sister naked, so I hasten to skip over her comment. “And then… then you lived happily ever after?”
She drinks the last of the martini, calls out, “Check, please!” and turns her level gaze back upon me. “Sometimes, I just don’t know about you. This isn’t some fucking fairy tale. Oh, I suppose we had a few good years. Eventually she left me for another woman. An artist I myself had discovered, as it happened, which wasn’t pretty. That’s when I cut off my hair. In the end, though, I like it better this way.”
I do not know whether she means her hairstyle or her life, and I am feeling too embarrassed to ask, so, to say something, anything, I tell her: “I guess all this happened after your mother’s funeral? Your hair was still long then.”
And now she is looking at me funny, and all at once uncomfortable, I lower my eyes, which is when I see the napkin the waitress brought her still lying on the table, and it is not a fresh napkin at alclass="underline" the paper square is visibly smudged with the red imprint of Gloria’s kiss.