it seem a coincidence, or friendly, that we’re meeting for lunch this way. He tells her I’m looking for a gallery in New York—which is true, of course, and not next week but the one after I go two days to meet with two galleries that may be interested to represent me. So this is the official question, if there is one, for the lunch, which one of these is best, and why, or whether I should be with a different gallery, another one, so. But really, secretly, Frank wants her to think of me for her big exhibition. There will be something like forty artists, and she wants it to be international, and I?”—Sirena made a film-star face, her hands held wide on either side of her cheeks—“I am very international!”
“That’s amazing. I mean, it’d be—”
“It would be a whole new level, yes? Of exposure, recognition, standing—can you imagine?”
“Yes.” I could imagine. How far from my world she would be catapulted, and how fast. “That’s completely amazing.”
“It hasn’t happened—it may never happen, I know—but I think she liked me, we laughed a lot, we got on very well—but what a dream, no? What a dream come true if it does.”
By which I felt it was asserted, or confirmed, that the dreams that were, for each of us, to the fore, were very different; and that the imaginary conversations that had so energetically circled my mind were not, at least, for today. Today was about Sirena. Of course it was. “I wish I’d brought a cake after all,” I said brightly. “We should be celebrating.”
“Celebrating? Not yet! No! We’re waiting—not till this critic decides—that could take ages—but until the meetings in two weeks, these gallery owners—this could change everything.”
“You didn’t tell me any of this before.”
“I’m superstitious. I’m not logical—I worry about spoiling my chances, about making bad luck.”
“But you’ll tell me now.” I didn’t say it as a question. If I sounded weary, she didn’t notice.
“So I shouldn’t—I hope it’s okay with the Fates—but I’ll tell you, yes, because otherwise I might explode.” She went on to describe the two gallerists she was going to meet. One was a young woman in her early thirties who’d only recently struck out on her own, after working for ten years at an established SoHo gallery, the name of which meant something even to me; and the other, Elias, was a guy in his forties, Middle Eastern, edgier, who’d had his gallery for a while and had attracted some attention in the art world for his bold choices. He, she explained, was a friend of a friend of Skandar’s, which was good in the sense that he was somehow a known quantity, his outline made sense and his track record was good, and he’d approached her when he heard she was in the States for a year. But the young woman had written to her in Paris, at her home address, not even knowing she was in the United States, and had said that the Elsinore installation had moved her to tears and that she’d never been able to forget it, and that if Sirena didn’t yet have any American representation, then she, Anna Z, would be happy to fly to Paris to talk it over with her—“and that,” Sirena observed, “is a commitment. That’s passion.”
Sirena was full of the pros and the cons of each of these possibilities, stumbling over her words in her enthusiasm, now that she’d allowed herself to talk about it. I wasn’t jealous—how could I be, when I, with my dioramas, had turned my back so deliberately upon the Eliases and Annas of this world?—but I wished I could more clearly see that it had occurred to her—that it might however slightly have worried her—that I might be.
“What does Skandar say?” I asked eventually, and noted the familiar flicker of exasperation.
“Skandar? What do you think? He can see it this way, he can see it that way; but, he says, it’s not a matter of how he sees it at all. For all he talks, my husband sometimes doesn’t say very much. In this case, officially he has no opinion. But I know he’d like me to choose Elias. His family is Lebanese. Has Skandar given you his special talk about the fishermen of Tyre? Yes, so: from Tyre to Princeton, via the long road—this is Elias. This is what Skandar, in his heart, would want.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, mildly resentful that my thrilling conversation