Small Town

He nodded again, told her he supposed she was right. And, if he was a little disappointed, it was clear to her that he was also more than a little relieved. If he’d been just a few years older, she thought, he’d have known to keep the relief from showing.

She felt a similar admixture of disappointment and relief when he was out the door. Part of what bothered her was that she’d planned on waiting until after the November show. She’d jumped the gun by three months, and for no good reason beyond libidinous curiosity. She wasn’t lacking for lovers, nor had she been driven by a particularly urgent yen for Reginald.

It took her a while, but she figured out what it was. She had an itch, and couldn’t reach to scratch it, so she’d scratched somewhere else, where it didn’t itch.

The itch was Creighton, and she couldn’t have him. So she’d used this boy, in a way that had proved pleasurable but unsatisfying for them both, and now he was gone, and she felt worse than when she’d started.

She bathed, put on a robe, turned on the television set. The news was bad, the way it always was. She switched channels, and landed in the middle of some special on terrorism, just in time for them to show her for the thousandth time the plane striking the tower, and the burst of yellow flame shooting out the other side.

“What’s the difference?” she said aloud. “What does it matter what anybody does? We’re all going to die.”

After her unfortunate (not to say costly) conversation with Harwood Zeller, after she’d called three different people to arrange a lunch date and found them all otherwise engaged, she skipped lunch and took a class at Integral Yoga, thinking it would calm her down. As far as she could tell, it had no effect whatsoever.

So she returned to the gallery and seduced Chloe.

At least that was what she thought she was doing. But it played out a little differently than she’d planned.

She’d waited until the gallery was empty, then surreptitiously locked the door. She went over and sat on the edge of Chloe’s desk, swinging her leg, and asked the girl if she’d had any more piercings since she’d gone to Medea.

“Well, I got the other nipple done,” Chloe said. “Want to see?”

They went into the back office, and Chloe cheerfully bared her breasts, and there was a stud in each, and how large and well formed they were.

“I went to Medea myself,” she said, and Chloe said No, really? You’re kidding me, right? In response she’d unbuttoned her own blouse, unclasped her bra, and held her breasts in the palms of her hands, offering them for inspection.

“Oh, they’re beautiful, Susan!”

“Tiny, compared to yours.”

“Oh, I’m a cow. Yours are so pretty.”

Could anything really be this easy? “I have something else to show you,” she said, and quickly got out of her slacks, removing her panties in the same motion.

Chloe gaped, reached out a hand, touched. With her other hand she grabbed Susan behind the head and kissed her full on the mouth. Below, the girl’s fingers were busy.

“We can go to my apartment,” she managed to say.

“First we’re each gonna get off,” Chloe said, “and then we’ll go to your apartment.”

So it was by no means clear who had seduced whom. Chloe, it turned out, had had plenty of experience with women, and had originally shown Susan her breasts not out of sheer exhibitionism but in the hope it might lead somewhere. “But you were so cool,” Chloe said, “I just figured you were straight as a gate. So I let it alone.”

At one point, lying on top of Chloe, tasting her own sex on Chloe’s mouth, her own breasts cushioned by Chloe’s breasts, she fitted her hands lightly around the girl’s neck, lacing her fingers, putting her thumbs together.

She thought, What are you doing? Stop it!

Not the next day or the day after, she left the gallery and walked down to the Village. Like some demented stalker, she went first to Charles Street, where she stood gaping at the brownstone where Marilyn Fairchild had lived and died, and then to Bank Street, where John Blair Creighton was presumably hard at work on the book that would make him rich.

She got lost looking for the Kettle of Fish, but found it, and went in and had a glass of white wine, hoping he’d walk in. He didn’t, and it was hard to see why anybody would. A collection of drunks and losers, she thought, with most of them able to claim membership in both groups. She finished her wine, fended off the halfhearted overtures of a man with the emptiest eyes she’d ever seen, and went home.

His number was in the book. That was how she’d found his address. She dialed his number and it rang and his machine picked up. She heard the message all the way through before ringing off.

She’d done this before. It was a way to hear his voice. But she wasn’t about to leave a message. What could she say?