Gently he pushed the hair from my eyes. I felt as though I might faint.
I am losing my mind, I thought. Or else this kid is losing his.
“Uh, sure,” I stammered. “We could duck in there—” I cocked my thumb at the Museum of American History. “—it’s air-conditioned, we could just kind of cool off and decide what to do next.”
“Sure. Here, let me take your bag—”
He reached for my briefcase but I tugged it from his hand. “That’s okay, it’s not heavy—”
“Really, I don’t mind—”
“No, it’s—”
I clutched my briefcase like it was the only thing keeping me from falling. “Right in here,” I babbled, hurrying up the steps.
Inside we wandered through throngs of tourists gaping at the first ladies’ gowns, Stanley Steamers, Fonzi’s leather jacket, the nation’s largest ball of string. We walked to where the doors opened onto Constitution Avenue and tourists crowded the gift shop and water fountains. All of a sudden I was noticing young girls—high school girls, college girls, mere children of twenty-five and -seven and thirty. All of them antic and colorful as guppies.
All of them younger than me.
The girls of summer everywhere and this poor kid was stuck with me, Electra on a coffee break.
But Dylan had inherited his mother’s ability to confer invisibility upon his companions: no one noticed me at all. The girls saw only Dylan. He ignored them, doing his best to carry on a serious conversation with me, which was difficult since what we were trying to talk about was what the floors were made of:
“Marble, you think?”
“Maybe just marble-colored linoleum.”
“Congoleum?”
“No, not linoleum, this is—”
This was nuts. We were acting like two people who were nervous because they were thinking about going to bed together, and I for one had always made it a policy not to sleep with someone until I had known him for at least twenty-four hours. Actually, in the last decade I hadn’t had much cause to implement that policy, or any of the others I’d made up over the years. And yet here I was, stumbling along in a daze beside someone half my age, who, to his credit, seemed to be equally nonplussed by the situation.
Probably he’s just embarrassed, I suddenly thought. The notion made my heart sink; but I knew it had to be true. He wanted to take off, meet some friends, make some friends, nice young people with tattoos and multiple body piercings; not hang around with a woman wearing sensible white tennis shoes and a Donna Karan suit.
“Listen, Dylan, do you want to go?”
We were outside now, balancing on the curb and feeling the last atoms of cool air plummet from our bodies onto the sweltering concrete. “There’s really no reason for us to go back to the museum today, they won’t get the a/c fixed till this evening and there’s no way to work there without it. And I know you probably have stuff to do…”
Dylan stared at the sidewalk, his long hair draping one side of his face. When he glanced up at me a moment later he looked crushed.
“Well, no,” he said. “I mean no, actually I don’t. I don’t know anyone here.” He rubbed his nose and coughed self-consciously. “Actually, can I take you to dinner?”
“Dinner? It’s only eleven o’clock.”
“Lunch, then, can I take you to lunch?”
“Uh—”
“Coffee, we could get espresso somewhere?”
I started to say no, but then there was that earnest face—that earnest, beautiful face—and the earnest, beautiful body it was attached to, now leaning rather precariously from the curb into Constitution Avenue.
“Listen, you don’t have to pay,” he said, a desperate edge creeping into his voice. “I have my own Visa—”
I started to laugh. Trust Angelica to send her only child into the big scary world with his own Visa.
“Or we could—”
“Okay, okay!—let’s go have lunch. Or espresso, or something. Only, no, you can’t pay for me—even though you have your own Visa. Christ, Dylan, get out of the road, you’re gonna get flattened by a Winnebago!”
I grabbed his arm as a land yacht roared past. For a moment we teetered on the edge of the curb, dust and smoke curling around us. He was tall enough to look down at me, he gripped my arm and held me tightly and I still hadn’t let go of his hand. Very dimly I could hear the distant skirling of a sitar fading into the drone of traffic. Then Dylan was pulling me closer to him, and before I could yank away he had dipped his head to graze my cheek with his lips. He smelled of car exhaust and sweat, and the faintest breath of sandalwood.
“Wow! Sweeney. Thanks. But you’ll have to tell me where we’re going.”
“Where we’re going?” I swallowed, my mouth dry and my heart pounding like I’d just run a mile. “I guess—we’ll go—well, somewhere that’s not around here.”
I looked over my shoulder at the museum. I unsnapped my ID and shoved it into a pocket, turned to Dylan and did the same to his. “Let’s see. Uh, we’ll go to—”
I frowned, staring out at the traffic, the tourists running to make the light. Then like a swallow lighting upon my shoulder it came to me.
Of course! Where else?!
I laughed. “We’ll go,” I said, grabbing his hand and pulling him after me into the crosswalk, “to Dumbarton Oaks.”
We spent the entire afternoon there, until the gates closed at five. We wandered across the lawns and through the boxwood labyrinth; gazed into the shallow pool with its mosaic of Bacchus and the grape arbor nearby; shook our heads at the grim remains of the bamboo garden that had flourished for so many years and had finally flowered, as bamboos do once a century, and then died. We ended at the trompe l’oeil wooden gate depicting a fountain, its splashing waters done in precious stones and mother-of-pearl, then found our way back up a narrow flagstoned path. We stopped to watch a small girl dart beneath a grove of miniature fruit trees, plucking kumquats and running to give them to her mother, a very proper Georgetown matron who promptly hid them in her Coach bag.
We wound up on the stone ramparts overlooking the pool. Dylan gazed longingly into its depths: a lozenge of purest turquoise shot with glints of gold, like the pool in the garden of the Hesperides, like the pool in a dream.
“Does anyone ever swim in it?”
“Maybe visiting Harvard horticultural fellows. I’ve never seen anyone.”
“It’s so beautiful. It reminds me of the pool at Keftiu—”
Keftiu. I gazed across to where wisteria bearded the high stone walls opposite. Where had I heard that before?
“What’s Keftiu?”
“My mother’s house on Crete. She always says it’s her favorite place in the world. I think sometimes that’s why she married my father,” he added softly. He rested his chin against the stone, his blue eyes wistful.
Keftiu. And I remembered the butterfly I had shown to Maggie that morning. The word had been part of its name.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s what the Egyptians called ancient Crete. Keftiu, or sometimes just Kefii.”
I was silent. Then I asked, “Why do you think it’s why she married your father?”
“Because he always said she loved that place more than she loved him. And I believe him. They met at a party on a yacht moored off the north coast of Crete. He took her to his place the next day—it’s not far from Knossos, and she’d never been there. She wanted to see the temple restoration, and she wanted to see Keftiu.”