“Thank you.” I raised my cup in salute, drank. I was touched by his awkwardness, and by my own. There was silence for a short while, because all I could think of to say was “Who’s with Reza?” or “What news from Sirena?” and these were both things I didn’t want to say. He was looking at me, in this time, very still, like a cat. I wondered briefly how much he might have had to drink.
“Did the students feed you well?”
“Falafel. Kebabs. You know.”
“I’ve got some pasta salad left over if you want it. Whole Foods. The rotini with pesto kind.”
He made a gesture, childlike rather than wolfish, of assent. I passed him the brown box. I made a show of washing the fork at the sink before I gave him that, too.
“Anything new?” I tried again. “In the wider world?”
“Ay. In Lebanon, today, another bombing. North of Beirut.”
I hadn’t expected this sort of an answer. I’d intended the question more lightly. It took me a minute to say anything. “Did anyone die?”
“Five or six people wounded. You won’t see much about it here. It’s only worth reporting if someone dies.”
“Do they know who’s responsible?”
He kept his head down, struggled with a wayward rotino. “The elections are in three weeks. Different voices want to make themselves heard. It’s a problem.”
“Were you talking about this with the students?”
“You know how students are—”
“I know how my students are,” I said, “but they’re eight years old.”
He smiled. “Isn’t it much the same? They have their opinions and they don’t really want to hear yours, unless it coincides with theirs. It’s always the same.”
“Well, in that sense, we’re all the same.”
“I often think,” he said, “that almost everyone is a child. That if you suddenly were to take off the masks of each of us, we would all be revealed as children.”
“I didn’t know I had a soul mate so near at hand.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I say a version of that almost every day. Sometimes I tell myself, when I’m dealing with annoying adults, to picture the kid there. Because no matter how annoying the kid is, I can feel compassion for him or her.”
“Always?”
“Almost always.”
“What kind of child were you?”
“Fun,” I said, although even as I said it, I realized I was picturing my mother, not myself: my tanned, angular mother in a lime-green golf skirt and a white sleeveless polo, with beaded sandals and enormous shades, a cigarette in one hand, a G&T in the other. She was flirting with Horace Walker from down the block, and she was emphatically not a child. “I was a very fun child. And you?”
“Serious.” He stood up from the cushions, not without effort. “Do you mind if I smoke?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I was much too serious as a child, and as a consequence, not very interesting.” He downed the contents of his coffee cup in a single swallow. “I should be going,” he said.
“You just lit a cigarette,” I said.
“True.”
She was there in the room with us, even though the lights at her end were turned off. I didn’t need to name her. “Do you want to see the installation so far?”
“In a minute,” he said. We both knew I was talking about her installation, not mine. “I’d like to see what you’re working on first.”
I didn’t know that I believed him—didn’t we all really want to see her installation? I poured more wine into his coffee cup. “Fine,” I said. “Sounds good. Which one did you want to see?”
“All of them,” he said, “if possible. How many are there?”
“Three. Well, two, really. One whole, and two halves.”
“Great. Show me.”
He pored over them, one after the other, squatting down and closing one eye to peer directly in the windows, rather than looking at them from overhead. He moved very slowly and he looked very carefully, and whenever he wanted to touch anything, he looked at me first, questioningly, and waited for my permission. While he was looking, he seemed very much the serious child he claimed he’d been, and it pleased me—it excited me—how gravely he took my rooms, my artists, and how there was no gushing and no exclamation, just silent care. He took care. I loved him for it, and couldn’t help comparing him with his wife, and thinking how much steadier, how much more freely his own person he was.
When he was done at last, he stood back and he looked at me, instead,