of thought and drifted into a twilight state that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t consciousness, towns reappearing and blinking out between intervals of trees. She woke with a start as the train pulled into Grand Central.
* * *
—
That was the last morning in the kingdom of money. She ate breakfast in a hotel restaurant near Grand Central. There was an hour in a bookstore, time spent in various shops, an interval of newspapers and coffee in an espresso bar in Chelsea. A strange moment: she stepped out of the espresso bar and into a tour group, a pack of tourists following a leader who held a red umbrella up in the air, and just for a moment, she saw her mother in the crowd. Only a flash, but it was unmistakable—the long brown braid down her back, the red cardigan she’d been wearing when she drowned—and then the crowd shifted and her mother was gone. Vincent stood for a long time on the sidewalk, watching the group walk away. Was she hallucinating? She was alert for signs of madness as she walked uptown through the gray city but saw nothing else that seemed obviously unreal. Central Park was monochromatic, dark trees dripping under a colorless sky.
She was on the steps of the Met when Jonathan called.
“Christmas party tonight,” he said. “You want to come by the office around seven-thirty, and we’ll walk over together?”
“Seven-thirty’s perfect,” Vincent said. “I’m looking forward to it.” She had in fact entirely forgotten about the holiday party. The dress she’d planned to wear was hanging in the bedroom closet in Greenwich, and there was nothing suitable in the pied-à-terre. But the age of money wouldn’t end for a few more hours, so this didn’t constitute an emergency, and she was free to linger for a while with her favorite painting. She had fallen in love with Thomas Eakins’s The Thinker, a massive image of a man in a dark suit, perhaps in his thirties, hands in his pockets, lost in pensive thought. She’d come back to this gallery several times in the past few weeks and stood before this painting, unaccountably moved by it. Her mother would have liked it, she thought.
When she turned to leave, she saw a man she recognized. He’d been looking at the same painting, standing back a little.
“Oskar,” she said. “You work with my husband, don’t you?”
“In the asset management unit.” They shook hands. “Nice to see you again.”
“I don’t mean this as a pickup line,” Vincent said, “but do you come here often?”
“Not as often as I’d like. I took a couple art history classes in college,” he added, as if he had to justify his presence here. They parted ways after a brief volley of small talk—“I hope you’re coming to the party tonight?”—and it might have been unmemorable except that that was the first time she found herself dwelling on the limitations of her arrangement with Jonathan. She enjoyed being with Jonathan, for the most part, she didn’t mind it, but lately she’d found herself thinking that it might be nice to fall in love, or failing that, at least to sleep with someone she was actually attracted to and to whom she owed nothing. She hailed a taxi and traveled to Saks, where she spent some time under dazzling lights and emerged an hour later with a blue velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. There were still so many hours left in the day. Don’t think of Paul, probably in a studio somewhere composing new music to accompany her plundered work. She hailed another taxi and went downtown to the financial district, to linger for a while in a café that she’d always especially liked. She stayed in the Russian Café for two hours, drinking cappuccinos and reading the International Herald Tribune.
By five o’clock she was restless, so she gathered her things and stepped out into the rain. She would find another café, she decided. She’d go up to Midtown and stake out a position near Jonathan’s office, so as to arrive perfectly on time. But halfway down the stairs to Bowling Green station, she was overcome by the certainty that if she went into the subway, she would die. She knew it as clearly as she knew her own name. Vincent turned around and half stumbled, half ran back up the stairs, pushing through a sea of commuters coming the other way, desperate to reach a bench before she fainted. She’d never fainted