fourth dimension. And there you’ve got the very best, the most contemporary work of the whole rising generation. Most of Doggs’s work in this show is iconic. Everyone who sees one of yours, Maurice, will say, ‘My God! That’s Doggs at the outset of his classic period,’ because I’m convinced that’s what his work is. It’s cutting-edge, and at the same time it’s classic. That kind of work isn’t available every day! Believe me!… Maurice… you have… really… scored this time.”
Really scored… Fleischmann looked very pleased, but his smile was the baffled smile of someone who can’t explain his own good fortune. Obviously he hadn’t understood a word of A.A.’s explanation. That made Magdalena feel better, because she hadn’t understood a word of it, either.
Rather than just sit there looking like 17 million dollars’ worth of bafflement, Fleischmann stood up and excused himself to A.A. and said he’d be right back. Fleischmann was hemmed in by other tables, and so Magdalena stood up and moved her chair to give him room. She happened to look about. Her heart jumped inside her rib cage. There he was, about four tables behind her chair—the Russian she had met so briefly, so profoundly! after dinner last night—and he was staring straight at her. She was so startled and excited, she couldn’t think of what to do. Wave? Run over to his table? Get a waiter to take a note? A flower? A handkerchief? Her tiny heart-on-a-string necklace? Before her mind stopped spinning, he had turned back to the six or seven people at his table. But she was sure. He had stared right at her.
What? Now it was Norman. He stood up and asked A.A. if she by any chance knew where there was a men’s room. ::::::Maybe he doesn’t want to just sit there while I beam black rays at him.:::::: A.A. pointed way off in that direction, the direction Fleischmann had headed in. “It’s over in the BesJet lounge,” she said. “This lounge doesn’t have one.”
Without so much as a glance at Magdalena, he headed off that way, too. Now there were just the two women, A.A. and Magdalena, on opposite sides of the table, clueless as to what to say to each other.
A lightbulb went on over Magdalena’s head. This was her chance! When she sat down, her back was to the Russian. But A.A. was facing him. Up to this point, A.A. had not said a single word to her. She hadn’t so much as looked at her. Now Magdalena stood up and beamed a terribly big smile at A.A. Was it a grin? In any case, she was determined to hold it on tight. She headed around the table toward A.A., holding the smile, the grin, so tightly above and below her teeth, it began to feel like a grimace. A.A. looked nonplussed. No, it was more than that. She was wary. Magdalena’s approach was so contrary to what A.A. expected. This clueless little girl who had turned up with the famous porn doctor… Magdalena had read all that in her face, that and her wish that the clueless little girl would do the appropriate thing—kindly stop grinning at her and keep away from her… and evaporate. Oh, Magdalena could read all that and more within that frame of bobbed blond hair, parted on one side and swept right across her brow and eye to the other… but there was no turning back now, was there… not after so much bolted-in-place grinning… and so she pulled up a chair, the one Fleischmann had been sitting in, right up next to A.A.’s… until their heads were barely twenty-four inches apart… But what was she going to say? No Hands popped into her head—
“—Miss Carr—Marilynn—may I call you Marilynn?”
“Certainly”—with a standoffish glare that said, “Call me anything you want and then fall through a hole in the floor. Okay?”
“Marilynn”—Magdalena was aware that her voice had acquired a sound she had never heard inside her skull before—“what you said about No Hands art, that was so-o-o-o fascinating! What makes it important?”
Just being turned to for her expertise took some of the chill off A.A.’s countenance. But then she expelled a big sigh, the sigh of someone who knows she’s about to undertake something laborious… and useless. “Well,” said A.A., “are you familiar with the expression ‘All great art is about art’?”
“No-o-o-o…” Magdalena maintained the congenial smile and wide-eyed fixation of someone who has a great thirst for knowledge and has found