“No, not at all.” He smiled. “I know what you mean.”
Mara daubed at the sweat on her glass with her napkin, thinking.
“You don’t know,” she said tentatively, “how much I appreciate your asking me to have lunch here, with you and Meret. It’s the first normal thing I’ve done in… ages.”
“Normal?”
Her eyes roamed the bookshelves. “Well, maybe normal isn’t the right word, but, I don’t know… comfortable, normal…” She took a deep breath. “It felt… tranquil.”
She looked up cautiously to see how that might strike him.
He nodded.
“I’m just trying to say that it felt good to be included in something like that.” She shook her head. “With this really absurd divorce grinding on, sometimes I feel an absence of context, as though I’m just not quite meshing with… anything.” She stopped. “This is muddy water to you, isn’t it? I’m not making myself very clear.”
Strand nodded. “I’ve enjoyed today, too. It’s been a good thing, for both of us.”
She looked at her watch. “Well, the morning appointment has turned into most of the day.” She stood. “It’s been wonderful. Thank you very much, Harry Strand.”
The time of day that Harry Strand hated finally arrived. It used to be his favorite, the hour just before dusk when the sun was poised only a few degrees above the horizon and the sharp light of the southern spring relented to the inevitable demise of another day. In the garden of the courtyard, protected by the stone walls of the old house, shade had already enveloped the fountain and the palms, and the blue hues of evening were alchemizing the tropical greens of Romy’s garden into deepening shadows.
Romy’s garden. Romy’s time of day. Sometimes Strand still kept their ritual, sitting in the quiet with a glass of ice-chilled Scotch. But it wasn’t any good anymore. The companionship was gone, the exchanges of small concerns and expressions of small delights. The Scotch remained. More of it now than before, of course. It didn’t replace what he had had, but for a little while every day it dulled the regret of having lost it.
Tonight, instead of taking his drink into the courtyard, Strand took it into the library, put on a CD of Lucia di Lammermoor, and took down all of his books on the five artists who had created Mara Song’s drawings. He put all the books on the library table, pulled his chair close, took a sip of Scotch, and began searching through the books.
After nearly an hour, Strand went into the kitchen to pour another drink. He returned to the library, turned off all the lights except a small one, and kicked off his shoes, propping his feet on the seat of another chair. Lucia di Lammermoor was well into its tragic story as he let his eyes settle on the drawing illuminated by the dim light on the wall at the end of the library table. There, in a space especially created in the center of the bookshelves, was his own Maillol drawing, a conte study of a nude the artist had done in preparation for executing the lithographic illustrations for the French-language edition of Lucian of Samosota’s The Dialogues of the Courtesans.
The image was of a woman who, in the process of walking away from the viewer, turns in midstride and looks back. It was the first drawing that Strand and Romy had bought together, shortly after she’d come to live with him while he was in Vienna. He had discovered it in the home of an old Austrian banker whose family had retained Strand to appraise his art collection prior to selling his estate. It was a lovely thing, and when he’d shown it to Romy she had reacted to it passionately. She had become intrigued by the tenuous message implied in the turn of the woman’s hips, by the curiosity conveyed in the twist of her neck and her tilted shoulders, her head, bent slightly and turned to cast a sidelong glance at the viewer.
The number of hours Strand had sat here looking at this drawing during the last year was well into the hundreds. Or so it seemed. Though the house was full of art that they had collected during their years together, this single drawing held more of Romy’s soul than any of them; when he was in its presence, he was in Romy’s presence.
It was at this moment that Strand suddenly thought of Mara Song. She was the first woman since Romy who had worked her way unbidden into his thoughts. He was just superstitious enough to find that of significance, though he had no idea what significance to attach to it. Maybe it simply meant that it had been long enough, and Mara’s appearance at this point in his life was nothing more than a gift of time and circumstance.
CHAPTER 8
Within a few days of receiving Mara’s drawings, Strand finished his appraisal of her images and asked her to come over to review it. She came in the middle of the afternoon, and they talked about his conclusions and how he would approach the sale. Mara was still there when Meret left at five o’clock. They had drinks. They talked. Strand suggested they go to Chiara’s for dinner.
A few days after that Mara called him to say she had received legal papers from Italy that represented yet another hurdle in her complex divorce proceedings. Would he like to celebrate-quietly? She had learned of a Thai restaurant that might be good. They ended the evening talking over drinks in the garden of Strand’s house.
Gradually, with neither of them bringing attention to it, the subject of the sale of the drawings fell away. Mara returned the drawings to the bank vault. Strand didn’t mention it because the sale of the drawings was a conclusion and introduced a connection to the end of something. He didn’t ask Mara why she had dropped the subject.
The next few weeks passed quickly. Strand and Mara saw a lot of each other, each of them growing increasingly at ease with calling the other to suggest dinner at a favorite restaurant or a movie or just to get together at either of their homes for a meal, which often ran late.
Mara came frequently enough to Strand’s at the end of the day that she and Meret soon became good friends. Often when Mara was coming over for the evening she would show up a little early, before Meret left for the day, and the two of them would have an early glass of wine and visit while Strand finished whatever he was doing in his office.
Sometimes on weekends when Meret wasn’t working, Mara would come over and spend the day, browsing in Harry’s library or playing CDs from his collection while he worked at his desk. She would bring her sketchbooks and curl up in a chair somewhere and work quietly. They would have drinks in the garden and talk, a pastime of which neither of them seemed to tire, every conversation bringing to each of them an accumulative knowledge of the other that continued to stabilize their friendship.
And it remained a friendship, a close friendship, but nothing more than that. Mara always went home in the evenings, or Strand did when he was at her place. Increasingly, though, Strand’s house became the place where they were most comfortable.
Strand thought a lot about what would happen if the relationship turned more intimate. In a way he yearned for it, but in another way he very much wanted to keep it just the way it was. He tried to make peace with his ambivalence, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to remove the boundary line that protected him from a level of complication that he still wanted to avoid.
For her part, Mara seemed at ease with this, and their friendship settled into a routine in which they desired and sought nothing more than simply to be in each other’s company. But it quickly moved beyond that to the point where they very much desired each other’s presence, and the alacrity with which this happened surprised both of them.
May and June passed from the calendar in this manner, and the first anniversary of Romy’s death slipped quietly past in a single summer night, its hurt and heartache softened, at least to the point of being bearable, by Mara’s reassuring presence. July was almost gone when Strand told Mara that he was going to have to start traveling.
“Really? For how long?” She was curled up in an armchair in his office, near the windows and his desk, sketching by the oblique light that came in from the courtyard. She had gathered her hair in a loose pile on her head to keep it out of her face while she sketched, securing it in place with a couple of pencils. She was barefoot, and she was eating a frozen lime bar, a napkin in her lap.
“A few weeks.” Strand put down his pen and pushed away from his desk. He had kicked off his shoes under the desk and propped his feet on an ottoman.
“Where are you going?”
