The trouble with that line was that it had worked when she was young because when she was young she was beautiful, also fierce in a calculated manner that she’d believed to be attractive, which had lent a certain irony to the suggestion that anyone could have possibly forgotten her—Oh, you know, just another gorgeous magnetic fresh young talent with gallery representation—but lately she’d found that the line sometimes elicited a tactful silence, and she’d realized that often people did not, in fact, remember her. (Idea for a ghost story: a woman gets old and falls out of time and realizes that she’s become invisible.)
“We met at the gallery with Lucas,” he said softly. “The night it snowed.”
The night it snowed, Olivia thought, and to her amazement, her eyes filled with tears. She hadn’t cried when Lucas died. She’d felt a little sad about it, obviously, she wasn’t a monster, it’s just that she was perpetually distracted and they’d hardly known one another. But all these decades later, the pity of it overcame her: in a version of New York so different that it might as well have been a foreign city, she’d stepped out of the cold night and into the brilliance of the gallery, which memory had transformed from a den of petty jealousies and grubby desperation into a palace of art and light, sheer brilliance in every sense of the word, walls vibrating with color, artists vibrating with genius and youth, where Lucas—so young, so talented, so doomed—and little Jonathan—who must have been, what, twelve?—awaited her arrival.
“You have a remarkable memory,” she said.
“Well, you were memorable. You were the beautiful woman who didn’t like my brother’s paintings.”
“I wish I hadn’t said so. I should’ve been kinder.” And then, on impulse, although she’d only meant to ask for a few minutes of his time over the phone: “Would you like to meet up for lunch sometime? I’ve come into some money, and I could use a little investment advice.”
“I would be delighted,” he said.
* * *
—
They saw one another a few times over the years that followed. She’d stop by his office sometimes, or they’d meet up for lunch. She looked forward to these lunches immensely; he was a warm, interested person, a good conversationalist, and he always picked up the check. He liked talking about Lucas and wanted to hear everything she remembered about his mysterious life in New York. “My brother was a decade older than me,” he said. “I loved him, but when you’re a kid, a decade is like the space between galaxies. I never felt that I knew him very well.”
“Do you know,” she said, “my sister and I are only three years apart, and I’ve never felt I knew her very well either.”
“It’s always possible to fail to know the people closest to us. But I’m fairly confident you knew my brother better than I did.”
“That’s a sad thought,” Olivia said. “I hope he had people in his life who really knew him.”
“Me too. But you knew him well enough to paint him.”
“We posed for each other, it’s true.”
“He painted you, then? I wondered about that.”
“He did.” In languid memory, she sat naked on his yellow sofa in the heat of a July afternoon. “Do you know, I’ve no idea what became of his painting of me?”
He smiled. “Really?”
“Really. He completed his painting of me in a single afternoon and sold it at some group art show a couple months later. It was pretty small, maybe a foot square, so he wouldn’t have sold it for much. I don’t know who bought it.”
“That means you can imagine it anywhere you want,” he said. “Anyone you can think of, it could be hanging in their house.”
“My favorite Hollywood actor,” she said, enjoying this idea.
“Sure, why not?”
“Well, thank you, Jonathan, I’ll enjoy the vision of that painting on display in Angelina Jolie’s living room.”
“I have to tell you something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I bought your painting of Lucas,” he said.
She had been eating salad; she put the fork down carefully, afraid she might drop it. “You did?”
“Just last month. I tracked down the guy who bought it at auction, and he was willing to sell. It was a little painful at first,” he said, “seeing how unhealthy he looked, those bruises on his arms. But I spent some time with the painting, and I realized that I love it. You captured something about him that accords with my memories. It’s hanging in