Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Yes, he is embarrassed. “Well, not really. I mean. Coffee first.”

She tugs down the sweater sleeves, beaming. “Let’s! I’ll pay.”

By the time they finish their cappuccinos and he figures out how to get out without hurting her feelings, he’s in love.

How does a man like Weston fall in love?

Accidentally. Fast. It’s nothing he can control. Still he manages to part from Wings Germaine without letting his hands shake or his eyes mist over; he must not do anything that will tip her off to the fact that this is the last good time. He even manages to hug good-bye without clinging, although it wrecks his heart. “It’s been fun,” he says. “I have to go.”

“No big. Nothing is forever,” she says, exposing that chipped tooth.

Dying a little, he backs away with a careful smile. To keep the life he’s built so lovingly, he has to, but it’s hard. “So, bye.”

Her foggy voice curls around him and clings. “Take care.”

They’re friends now, or what passes for friends, so he trusts her not to follow. Even though it’s barely four in the afternoon he locks his front door behind him, checks the windows, and sets the alarm.

That beautiful girl seemed to be running ahead of his thoughts so fast that when they exchanged life stories she saw the pain running along underneath the surface of the story he usually tells. Her triangular smile broke his heart. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he told her. “It’s nothing you did.”

“No,” she said. “Oh, no. But I’ve been there, and I know what it’s like.”

Orphaned, he assumed. Like me, he thinks, although she is nothing like him. Named in honor of her fighter-pilot father, she said. Art student, she said, but she never said when. Mystifyingly, she said, “You have some beautiful stuff.” Had he told her about the Calder maquette and forgotten, or mentioned the Sargent portrait of his great-grandfather or the Manet oil sketch? He has replayed that conversation a dozen times today and he still doesn’t know.

At night, even though he’s secured the house and is safely locked into his bedroom, he has a hard time going to sleep. Before he can manage it, he has to get up several times and repeat his daytime circuit of the house. He patrols rooms lit only by reflected streetlights, padding from one to the next in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, touching table tops with light fingers, running his hands over the smooth marble flank of the Brancusi, because every object is precious and he needs to know that each is in its appointed place.

Day or night, Weston is ruler of his tight little world, secure in the confidence that although he let himself be waylaid by a ragged stranger today, although he ended up doing what she wanted instead of what he intended, here, at least, he commands the world.

Then why can’t he sleep?

The fourth time he goes downstairs in the dark he finds her sitting in his living room. At first he imagines his curator has moved a new Degas bronze into the house in the dead of night. Then he realizes it’s Wings Germaine, positioned like an ornament on his ancestral brocade sofa, sitting with her arms locked around her knees.

“What,” he cries, delighted, angry and terrified. “What!”

Wings moves into his arms so fluidly that the rest flows naturally, like a soft, brilliant dream. “I was in the neighborhood.”

They are together in a variety of intense configurations until Weston gasps with joy and falls away from her, exhausted. Drenched in sense memory, he plummets into sleep.

When the housekeeper comes to wake him in the morning, Wings is gone.

* * *

By day Weston is the same person; days pass in their usual sweet order, but his nights go by in that fugue of images of Wings Germaine, who hushes his mouth with kisses whenever he tries to ask who she is and how she gets in or whether what they have together is real or imagined. No matter how he wheedles, she doesn’t explain; “I live in the neighborhood,” she says, and the pleasure of being this close quiets his heart. He acknowledges the possibility that the girl is, rather, only hallucination and—astounding for a man so bent on control—he accepts that.

As long as his days pass in order, he tells himself, as long as nothing changes, he’ll be okay. He thinks.

When Wings arrives she does what she does so amazingly that he’s never quite certain what happened, only that it leaves him joyful and exhausted; then she leaves. His nights are marvels, uncomplicated by the pressure of the usual lover’s expectations, because they both know she will be gone before the sun comes up. She always is. He wakes up alone, to coffee and the morning paper, sunlight on mahogany. Their nights are wild and confusing, but in the daytime world that Weston has spent his life perfecting, everything is reassuringly the same.

Or so he tells himself. It’s what he has to believe. If he saw any of this for what it is, he’d have to act, and the last thing Weston wants right now is for his dizzy collisions in the night to end.

Until today, when he hurtles out of sleep at 4:00 A.M. Panic wakes him, the roar of blood thundering in his ears. His synapses clash in serial car crashes; the carnage is terrible. He slides out of bed in the gray dawn and bolts downstairs, lunging from room to room, shattered by the certain knowledge that something has changed.

Unless everything has changed.

What, he wonders, running a finger over tabletops, the rims of picture frames, the outlines of priceless maquettes by famous sculptors, all still in place, reassuringly there. What?

Dear God, his Picasso plates are missing. Treasures picked up off the master’s studio floor by Great- grandfather Weston, who walked away with six signed plates under his arm, leaving behind a thousand dollars and the memory of his famous smile. Horrified, he turns on the light. Pale circles mark the silk wallpaper where the plates hung; empty brackets sag, reproaching him.

He doesn’t mention this to Wings when she comes to him that night; he only breathes into her crackling hair and holds her closer, thinking, It can’t be her. She couldn’t have, it couldn’t be Wings.

Then he buries himself in her because he knows it is.

Before dawn she leaves Weston drowsing in his messy bed, dazed and grateful. His nights continue to pass like dreams; the rich orphan so bent on life without intrusions welcomes the wild girl in spite of certain losses; love hurts, but he wants what he wants. Their time together passes without reference to the fact that when Weston comes down tomorrow his King George silver service will be missing, to be followed by his Kang dynasty netsuke, and then his best Miró. I love her too much, he tells himself as objects disappear daily. I don’t want this to stop.

He inspects. All his external systems remain in place. Alarms are set; there’s no sign of forcible entry or exit. It is as though things he thought he prized more than any woman have dropped into the earth without explanation.

He can live without these things, he tells himself. He can! Love is love, and these are only objects.

Until the Brancusi marble goes missing.

In a spasm of grief, his heart empties out.

* * *

Wings won’t know when they make love that night that her new man is only going through the motions— unless she does know, which straightforward Weston is too new at deception to guess. He does the girl with one eye on the door, which is how he assumes she exits once she’s pushed him off the deep end into sleep—which she has done nightly, vanishing before he wakes up.

Careful, Wings. Tonight will be different.

To him, Wings is a closed book.

He needs to crack her open like a piñata and watch the secrets fall out.

Guilty and terrible as he feels about doubting her, confused because he can’t bear to lose one more thing, he can’t let this go on. With Wings still in his arms he struggles to stay awake, watching through slitted eyes for what seems like forever. She drowses; he waits. The night passes like a dark thought, sullenly dragging its feet. Waiting is terrible. By the time a crack of gray light outlines his bedroom blackout shades, he’s about to die of it. The girl he loves sighs and delicately disengages herself. Grieving, he watches through slitted eyes, and when she goes, he counts to twenty and follows.

He knows the house better than Wings; she’ll take the back stairs, so he hurries down the front. When she