She’d asked Nora once if she’d ever met Hemingway, and Nora had said, “If I did, he didn’t make an impression.”
But she imagined that in the intervening decades, the avant-garde had changed its meet-up spot.
If this was really where Ranko Novak had lost it, it seemed an odd place. Everything was warm and red and magical, and the soup was so good.
Well, if you were going to be miserable, you could be miserable anywhere. She’d known that for years: the way one person could starve to death at the banquet, the way you could sob through the funniest movie.
The waiter asked if she would like dessert. She ordered another soup instead, exactly the same as the first.
1986
After the gallery closed, Yale brushed his teeth in the bathroom. He shaved again so he’d look okay in the morning, and he changed his shirt. He left his things under his desk.
Evanston was not a town where places stayed open all night, and he thought he’d have a better chance in the city, so he went back down on the El. His plan was to stay pretty south on Clark, where Charlie wasn’t as likely to be. He started down at Inner Circle, which was dead, and then he headed up toward Cheeks to see if the cute bald bartender was working. He was a block away when he saw, in front of him on the sidewalk, the back of Bill Lindsey, his loping gait. Yale froze and figured he’d backtrack, but then Bill looked over his shoulder and stopped and called to Yale, gave a giant wave that Yale couldn’t pretend not to have seen.
When Yale caught up, Bill said, “You live near here, yes? It’s not an area I know too well.”
“Bit north of here.”
“Well, this is serendipity! I have something in my car that I forgot to bring to the office today. You’re going to be thrilled.”
And so Yale found himself following Bill to his Buick, the same car they’d all ridden triumphantly back from Wisconsin in. Bill was parked right outside Cheeks. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all, except that he was talking faster than usual.
“Look!” Bill said, and thrust an enormous book at him. Yale rested it on the car’s hood.
Pascin: Catalogue raisonné: Peintures, aquarelles, pastels, dessins. The second volume. Bill said, “Page sixty. Tell me what you see.”
“Oh.” A woman in a chair, blonde waves parted far to one side, a nightgown falling off her shoulders, pooling in her lap. The pose was exactly the same as in Nora’s supposed Pascin study. The face was the same. The only difference was that here she wore clothes. Yale said, “That’s great news.” He felt like laughing. That his luck should be so good only at work.
“I can ask her about it,” Yale said. “I can take this up there with me.”
“What I want you to do—before you get all her stories, and I know that’s what she wants—is to see if she can remember what paintings might’ve been done from the sketches. Because this one, for instance—Yale, this is in the Musée d’Orsay! Maybe they’ll have interest in the sketch, you know? Display it beside the original. Not to sell,” he said, seeing Yale’s face, “but a loan or exchange. I can send the catalogs with you to Wisconsin. Of course there’s no Hébuterne catalog, or Sergey What’s-His-Face. And no Ranko Novak catalog, ha! But we’re going to load your trunk with books.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want to come?”
“I have so much to do for the Polaroids.” The Polaroid show didn’t open till August, but Bill was dealing with loaned Ansel Adams and Walker Evans pieces, and every time he talked about the exhibit he wound up flapping his hands in frustration. “I want you back up there very soon. You and Roman. He’s a fine specimen, no?”
Yale had no idea how to respond. “He seems like a quick study,” he said.
As he got in his car, Bill winked.
* * *
—
Yale sank onto a barstool in the darkest corner of Cheeks and pried his feet loose from the stickiness of the floor and ordered a Manhattan. It was a safe place to spend time, and they wouldn’t close till four, and he kept seeing faces he vaguely knew. The receptionist from the gay-friendly dentist on Broadway, Katsu Tatami’s ex, the tall Canadian Nico had once been obsessed with. He had a long purple lesion on his left cheekbone. A former staffer of Charlie’s came up to say