I Knew You'd Be Lovely (9 page)

But there was no way to explain this to her. After his mother, Janet was the most practical woman he'd ever met. She would laugh him out of the restaurant. She would think less of him.

“It's a surprise,” he said. “You'll see. You won't want to have known in advance.”

“I'd rather not be surprised,” Janet said, unswaddling her knife and fork from their napkin.

The waiter arrived with the appetizers. “Well, you're going to have to be,” said Felix.

Back in their room, Janet stuck to her side of the bed and immediately went to sleep. All night long, while she slept beside him, he stared at the ceiling fan, as alert as if the cashews he'd eaten from the minibar had been fistfuls of espresso beans. The red numerals on the alarm clock seemed to quiver with life.
Something's coming
, they said.

The Monday he got back, the head of the firm called him into his office. “We had a problem while you were away,” he said. Felix felt a percussive rhythm in his chest. “Hackers got into our system. I'll need you to draft a letter to all your clients explaining what has happened. And you should expect an internal audit of all your accounts.”

In his head, Felix began scanning his data banks for possible humiliations. As unpleasant as it was to contemplate his boss reading every personal e-mail he'd ever written, he hadn't done anything objectionable. At least, nothing he could think of. But he didn't really want to think about it too much. Instead, he went into his office, closed the door, and began to work on the letter.

While he set out to make a list of his cases with the most sensitive confidential information, that wasn't the list he found himself composing.

One of his most important clients was a company that was spending more money defending its toxic dumping than it would have cost to clean it up. He laid down his mechanical pencil and stared at the page. He didn't recall having written the final three words, but there they were:
I hate this
.

At the end of the week, he went to Bandera. Janet didn't expect him until late on Fridays, and Bandera was always crowded in a way that made him feel part of the throng rather than separate from it. Not that he would have minded being alone. By this point, the anticipation had escalated to a low-frequency ringing in his ears, and after a long day, he sometimes had difficulty understanding what people were saying.

Tonight it was the opposite of when he'd come with Daphne. It seemed he couldn't drink enough. He ordered a gimlet, then a vodka tonic, then a martini. He was hoping to discover the elixir that would clear his mind, sober him up. Nothing did. It was a mistake to have admitted to himself that he hated his work, and now that he had, he couldn't take it back. He could see with painful clarity how he'd wound up in this predicament. He'd enjoyed the study of law, but the practice of law had less to do with John Rawls and more to do with filing BlueBacks. Law school had been the classic intellectual sanctuary from certain practical considerations. Then it had ended, and he'd needed to make a living. So here he was.

When he was young, perhaps because of the premonitions,
he'd wanted to be a magician. In a box somewhere in his mother's attic there was even a photograph of him in a peach tuxedo, holding a black hat and a pack of cards, grinning. As a teenager, he'd told his secret ambition to his mother, a woman who lived as if she'd come of age in the Great Depression rather than the 1950s. “Dreamer,” she'd muttered, under her breath. But Felix had heard. Some mornings he wondered if he'd become a lawyer precisely because it was the least dreamlike thing he could be.

There was Daphne. She was sitting at the other end of the bar, with what must have been her boyfriend, a surprisingly preppy-looking guy in a St. John's lacrosse shirt. Felix rose and ambled toward her, sliding his glass along the polished brass countertop.

“Hello, Miss Edmunds,” he said. He could see the lacy outline of a black bra through her blouse. “And how are you this evening?”

“Bug off, buddy,” said the boyfriend.

Felix was eager to correct the impression that he was a suitor. “We work together,” he said. He thought, but did not say:
I'm her boss
.

“Whoop dee do,” said the boyfriend. Daphne was plucking a cherry off a toothpick with her dark fingernails. “Leave her alone,” he said. “You're not her type.”

Felix looked at Daphne. The minx lifted her shoulders and let them fall, as if to say:
You're not; what can we do?

Of all the—“Look, pal,” Felix said, straightening to his full height.

The boyfriend laughed. “Look? Yeah? Look where?”

Felix checked himself. It wasn't worth it. None of it was worth it. He walked back to his stool and grabbed his coat, tapping his forehead in a quick salute.

“See you 'round,” he said.

He was too drunk to drive, too agitated to sit still in a cab. So he decided to walk. As he swayed his way up the freeway on-ramp, he realized why no one walks in Los Angeles. All these drivers, swerving and honking, in a hurry and angry about it! It was as if they were all late for somewhere they didn't want to be going in the first place. Why didn't they just go somewhere better?

Then it hit him. That's what he would do. He would change his life. It wasn't too late. He had money in the bank; Janet had a good job; he didn't have to sit at a desk growing bitter like Daphne—clearly she was more bitter than he'd first imagined. He could switch careers, take a risk—he wouldn't have to become a magician, but he could do something he enjoyed more than practicing law. Heck, at this point, almost anything would satisfy that criterion. He picked up his pace. He felt more surefooted. Maybe this thing wasn't something that would happen
to
him so much as something he would initiate
himself
.

But he needed a plan. A plan was paramount. He pressed his fingers to his temples and tried to think. The driver of a red Taurus threw an empty Pepsi bottle out the window, and it nicked his elbow. Felix didn't care. The world, like a bride, was finally unveiling its hidden mysteries to him. He had a friend who was opening a bar and had asked him to look over the paperwork. Perhaps
Felix could go in on it with him, be his partner, make it a place like Bandera. Or maybe he could start a restaurant that also had a cabaret in the back, for musicians and actors, even magicians.

He was smiling and his heart was beating fast. It was possible he'd found the perfect solution. When he got home, he would open up and tell Janet everything. She might not like his idea at first, but she would come around—she always did. He would kiss her on the lips while she was still asleep, then he would turn on the bedside lamp and explain to her that change was possible. Change, life, all of it. The dream of his youth was not entirely dead. There was a flicker of something true that burned within him still. It was a relief to realize such a thing. No, it was victory. It was the thing itself.

Someone yelled something and waved his arm out the window. Felix ignored it. A feeling he recognized from childhood had crept into his chest and was radiating out his skin. He felt free for the first time in decades; it was as if the air he'd been inhaling up till now had all been made of counterfeit oxygen. Tomorrow morning he would quit his job, then he would call his mother and ask her to look for that picture of him in the peach tuxedo. Life could still be an adventure. It wasn't too late. Cars whizzed past him, but he didn't even notice them anymore. His eyes were fixed on the moon, full and low and lovely, like a beacon. Like a rolling ball of white light in the sky.

It all happened so quickly it was hard to feel anything except surprise. He got home and closed the door quietly; he didn't want to disturb Janet. He stepped inside, feeling stealth and tiny, like an ant that had just completed
a long journey. But as soon as he crossed the threshold, there she was, standing in the foyer, her eyes glossy with a happiness he'd never seen in them before. As if she'd been waiting for him. As if his adventure were just about to start.

I'm wearing only my underpants and sitting in a window seat with my back to the Hasidic grocery across the street. It's one in the afternoon, and Misha is painting me. The embroidered cushion on which my backside rests was initially a comfort, but over the course of the past four hours, with the help of the midday sun, it has begun to feel like a very subtle instrument of torture. Inexplicably, it is itching me in a way I feel in my gut. There are those who spend their lives consciously or unconsciously courting such discomforts; I am not one of them. Something about Misha's style makes him try to capture as much as possible of the final painting in the initial sitting, so I'm essentially on a twelve-hour fourth-date semi-naked marathon. At first I thought this arrangement might be enlightening, if not downright conducive to epiphanies—the endurance, the inner quiet, the lack of food. But thus far, the experience is more sweaty than transcendent.

“What are you working on?” I ask. Misha is silent, but I can see the color on the tip of his brush. “Are you doing my hair? My mane?”

“It's a complicated red,” he says half-distractedly, like a combination painter-oenophile.

“Thank you,” I say. Misha says nothing. “I get it from my grandmother.”

He shifts his weight to his other foot. “Is it the reason for your name?”

“God, no. I was bald when I was born. That's just an unfortunate coincidence.” I then proceed to tell him the story of my paternal grandmother, Florence—“Torchy,” they called her in college—whose hair was so red that as a little girl, she wasn't allowed to sit as close to the fire as her sisters were. Her mother was afraid her head would ignite out of sympathy with the flames. Misha seems to like this story.

“Okay,” I say. “Now you have to tell me a story about your grandmother.”

He dips his brush and continues painting. “What if I don't have any?” he says. I make a pout, even though I've been instructed to maintain an approximation of equipoise at all times. When he gets to my face (apparently he saves this for last), I won't be allowed to speak.

“Then make one up.”

He answers while painting, his eyes fixed on the canvas. “My grandmother was a Jew,” he says. “My mother, Zdena, was born inside a concentration camp. Once I asked her how it was possible for an infant to survive in such a place, but she just shook her head, and we never
spoke of it again.” He utters these words with a perfectly blank expression, in monotone, and I have the strange feeling he isn't making it up at all.

“Is that true?” I say.

He shrugs.

“You shouldn't joke around about things like that.”

“Who says I'm joking?” he says, momentarily lifting his focus from the canvas to lock eyes with me. His eyes are as beautiful and opaque as polished stones.

Misha and I met two months ago, when he was walking his dachshund in SoHo. I would later learn that he'd been there to drop off his portfolio at a gallery, and that the dog was on loan from a friend who'd gone home to Ukraine for a week. A blonde in a black fur coat made ooohs of excitement and bent down to pet the animal.

“It's a wiener dog!” she said.

Misha examined her coolly. “ ‘Wiener dog,' madam, is a racial slur.”

I was standing nearby, holding my bike, about to text a friend to see if she wanted to join me for coffee. Upon hearing this, I started to laugh. I reached into my backpack and asked if it would be all right if I gave the dog a piece of beef jerky. Thirty minutes later, Misha and I were having espressos at Café Luxe, and I had agreed to go on a date with him. When he told me he was a painter, I think I knew that I would one day consent to sit for him.

It should have dawned on me then how breathtakingly boring it would be. The one saving grace is that Misha is actually quite good. The Marlborough Chelsea recently showed his work, and reviews called his paintings—especially
the oil portraits—extremely accomplished and well-conceived. But what I like is they have an unfinished quality that makes them look alive. Still, in spite of a frequently exercised inner life, I'm restless.

“Let's play a game,” I say. Misha takes a sip from a water glass on the stool beside him. “Name something you regret,” I say.

He swallows and puts down the glass. “I'm not sure I want to play this game,” he says.

“Well, I'm not sure I want to sit here this long.”

He appears dissatisfied with whatever he sees on the canvas. “I regret everything,” he says.

“Interesting,” I say, quietly hoping he doesn't mean anything particular to me or my person. “Name something you're afraid of.”