motion and did what we thought was best. There were so many times, during those last few months particularly, that I wanted to turn to you, apologize for having blamed you … but I was stubborn. I couldn’t handle all the guilt I felt. I had to saddle someone else with it to protect my own sanity, and that should have been Hedges, not you. I’m sorry.'
'I understand,' he told her. 'I did then, too, though it was difficult.'
The longing in her eyes, the deep regret, mirrored his own emotions. 'It’ll be even harder now,' she said, covering his hand with her smooth palms. 'It’s going to take a lot of understanding, on both our parts.'
The gallery was on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, the Triangle Below Canal Street, which had replaced Soho as Manhattan’s primary artists' enclave. Since the mid-eighties, though, the same process that had led to the exodus from Soho had begun anew in TriBeCa: Trendy bars and restaurants were sprouting on the side streets off Hudson and Varick, the prices in the shops and galleries had begun to reflect the spending power of their uptown patrons, and loft space was at a premium. Soon the young painters and sculptors and performance artists whose presence had set in motion the flowering of this once-desolate corner of the city would be driven out to some new bohemia, some thoroughly undesirable, and thus affordable, sector of this congested island. Jeff spotted the understated brass plaque that identified the Hawthorne Gallery, and led Linda through the doorway of the renovated building that had once been a tenement next to an industrial warehouse. They came into an elegantly sparse reception area, white walls and ceiling, a low black sofa facing a curved black desk. The only decoration was a surprisingly delicate piece of hanging ironwork, its elongated slender swirls like a distillation and extension of the intricate iron filigree typical of the gates and balconies of old New Orleans.
'May I help you?' asked the whippet-thin young woman behind the desk.
'We’re here for the opening,' Jeff said, handing her the embossed invitation.
'Certainly,' she said, consulting a printed list and crossing off their names. 'Go right in, won’t you?'
Jeff and Linda walked past the desk, into the main gallery space. The walls were the same stark white, but devoted to the display of what might have seemed a riot of images, had their placement not been subject to such careful design. The one huge room had been subdivided here and there into intimate little alcoves suited to quiet study of the contemplative pieces they contained, while at the other extreme the full grandeur of the larger works was enhanced by the openness of the areas in which they were exhibited.
The gallery was dominated by a twenty-foot canvas of an undersea vista that could exist only in the imagination of the artist: a serene mountain peak far beneath the waves, its unmistakably distinctive symmetry undimmed, the snows upon its heights undisturbed by the waters that surrounded it. A school of dolphins swam among the crevasses of its lower slopes; looking closer, Jeff could see that two of the dolphins had ageless, clearly human eyes.
'It’s … stunning,' Linda said. 'And look, look at that one over there.'
Jeff turned to see where she had pointed. The smaller painting there was no less striking than the image of that drowned mountain; this one depicted the view from within a sailplane, stretched as if by a wide-angle lens to encompass a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree field of vision. In the foreground, the rudder stick and struts of the plane were visible; through the windows, another glider could be seen close by … and both were soaring, not through blue sky, but in the infinity of space, in orbit around a dusky-orange ringed planet.
'I’m glad you could come,' Jeff heard a voice behind him say.
The years had been kind to her this time. There was none of the drawn, haggard emptiness that had haunted her face in Maryland, and in New York after they had first met Stuart McCowan. Though she was unambiguously a woman in her late thirties, her face shone with the clear light of contentment.
'Linda, I’d like you to meet Pamela Phillips. Pamela, this is my wife, Linda.'
'I’m so pleased to meet you,' Pamela said, taking Linda’s hand. 'You’re even lovelier than Jeff had told me.'
'Thank you. I can’t tell you how impressed I am by your work; it’s absolutely magnificent.'
Pamela smiled graciously. 'That’s always nice to hear. You should look at some of the smaller pieces, too; they’re not all quite so imposing or austere. Some of them are even quite humorous, I think.'
'I look forward to seeing the whole show,' Linda said eagerly. 'It was kind of you to invite us.'
'I’m happy you could make it up from Florida. I’ve been an admirer of your husband’s books for years, even before we met last month. I thought he and you might enjoy seeing some of the things I’ve been doing.'
Pamela turned toward a knot of people who stood nearby, sipping wine and nibbling from small plates of pasta salad with pine nuts and pesto sauce. 'Steve,' she called, 'come on over; there are some people I’d like you to meet.'
A friendly-looking man wearing glasses and a gray twill jacket detached himself from the group and moved to join them. 'This is my husband, Steve Robison,' Pamela said. 'I use my maiden name, Phillips, for my work, and Robison for real life. Steve, this is Jeff Winston and his wife, Linda.'
'A pleasure.' The man beamed, gripping Jeff’s hand. 'A genuine pleasure. I think Harps upon the Willows is one of the best things I’ve ever read. Won the Pulitzer, didn’t it?'
'Yes,' Jeff said. 'I was gratified that it seemed to strike a chord in so many people.'
'Hell of a book,' Robison said. 'And your last one, the one on people returning to the places where they grew up, that runs a close second. Pamela and I have both been big fans of yours for a long time; I believe some of your thoughts have even influenced her own work. I couldn’t believe it when she told me she’d met you on the plane from Boston a few weeks ago. What a wonderful coincidence!'
'You must be very proud of her,' Jeff said, sidestepping the fiction he and Pamela had concocted to explain their knowing each other. She’d written him at the beginning of the summer, wanted to see him, at least briefly, before this final autumn wanted him to see this opening. Jeff hadn’t even been to Boston this year. Pamela had flown there and back alone to set up their prearranged story while he spent a week in Atlanta, walking around the Emory campus and thinking of all he’d been through since that first morning when he’d awakened in the dorm room there.
'I’m extremely proud of her,' Steve Robison said, putting an arm around his wife. 'She hates to have me talk this way about her, says it makes it sound like she’s not even in the room. But I just can’t help boasting when I think of all she’s accomplished, in so short a time and with two kids to raise.'
'Speaking of which'—Pamela smiled—'that’s them over there by the phoenix sculpture. Behaving themselves, I hope.'
Jeff looked across the gallery, saw the children. The boy, Christopher, was an endearingly ungainly fourteen-year-old, on the awkward brink of manhood; and Kimberly, at eleven, was already a young facsimile of Pamela. Eleven. Just two years younger than Gretchen, when—
'Jeff,' Pamela said, 'there’s an exhibit I especially want to show you. Steve, why don’t you get Mrs. Winston some pasta and a glass of wine?'
Linda followed Robison toward the caterer’s buffet and bar, and Pamela led Jeff toward a small cylindrical enclosure, a tiny room within a room, at the center of the gallery. Several people stood waiting to enter the cubicle, outside of which was mounted a small card requesting that it be occupied by no more than four persons at a time. Pamela turned the card around so that it read 'Temporarily closed for repairs.' She apologized to those in line, told them she needed to make some adjustments to the equipment. They nodded sympathetically, wandered off to other areas of the show. After a few moments a quartet of guests emerged from the booth and Pamela took Jeff inside, closing the door behind them.
The exhibit was a video display, a dozen color monitors of various sizes set into the inner walls of the darkened cylinder, with a round leather seat in the center. The screens flickered from every direction, an arm’s reach away wherever the viewer turned. Jeff’s eyes moved from one to the next at random, focusing, adjusting. Then he began to comprehend what he was seeing. The past. Their past, his and Pamela’s. The first thing he noticed was the news footage: Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations, Apollo
