“I don’t understand why you did it,” she said. “You can’t sacrifice your career just to be noble!”
He imitated her voice. “Just like you can’t sacrifice your college education just to be noble!”
Fiona decided she wanted a soda, and so as Roman came out, she went in. Roman looked comically out of place next to the scattered Wisconsinite families with their puffy coats. He wore a black bomber jacket over his black T-shirt, and of course his jeans and shoes and glasses were black as well. Like a terribly chic undertaker. He came and stood next to Yale, who pretended to read a historical sign about Marquette and Joliet. He was still thinking about Bill, about Asher, and now here was Roman, reading the sign too, close enough that Yale could hear him breathe. Their arms, after a minute, were touching. Their shoulders, their hips. Roman moved his hand behind Yale as if he were going to touch it to his back, but Yale never felt any pressure. He seemed to be just hovering his hand there, daring himself.
Roman said, “I didn’t know Marquette was a priest.”
“Wasn’t everyone a priest back then?”
“Well.”
The sidewalk exploded under them.
Or rather, it shattered, glass fragments all around, the concrete still in place, their shoes and feet still there.
Yale spun to see a large woman with teased-out hair and a jean jacket—looking back at them, but walking toward the rest-stop doors. Another woman walked quickly ahead of her, laughing. Her friend, maybe, embarrassed by the scene. It was a bottle that had broken at their feet, a root beer bottle, the remnants of the drink foaming up around the glass shards.
“You make me ill!” the large woman shouted, and then she ran to catch up to her friend. “Fucking pedophile perverts!” They disappeared inside.
Roman took a step back, into the mess. He made his mouth into a small O and blew out slowly.
Yale said, “I guess she’s not a fan of historical signs.” He was shaking, but he wanted to make everything okay. He felt responsible, as if by giving Roman that hand job he’d made this all happen, turned Roman noticeably gay. It was ridiculous, he knew.
Roman got off the sidewalk and rubbed his shoes on the hardened snow. “She couldn’t even see our faces. All she saw was our backs.”
Yale said, “Are you okay? I’m sorry. That—”
“It’s not like I haven’t heard it before.”
“I mean, it’s Wisconsin.”
“Don’t pretend that happened because we crossed the Wisconsin border.”
Yale said, “Look, let’s not tell Fiona.”
And here she came.
* * *
—
They found Nora looking better than last time, her wheelchair pulled up to the dining table, where she had her shoebox letters laid out in stacks. She stood precariously to hug Fiona, to tell Yale he looked tired. Debra had seen them in, pecked Fiona coldly on the cheek, avoided Yale entirely, and then left to go grocery shopping. Yale hoped she was doing more than that, was seeing friends, rolling in the dirt, pawning her jewelry, something.
Yale told Nora they were aiming to put the show up next October, but he didn’t say he was losing his job. If she’d heard it from Debra, she didn’t let on.
“We’ll kidnap you and drive you down!” Fiona said. “We’ll wheel you around and make everyone get out of your way!”
Nora laughed. “People do make room for a wheelchair.”
Yale told her this was a more social visit than the previous ones. “And believe it or not, we aren’t here to pin you down on dates. We want to hear about Ranko, for one thing. You kind of left us hanging.”
Nora was thrilled to fill them in, but she insisted they make themselves sandwiches first. She’d prepare them herself, if it weren’t for the chair. The three of them found Wonder Bread and cheese and sandwich spread. Wilted iceberg lettuce, too, which Yale wanted nothing to do with. Roman put a piece on his sandwich, arranged it so the green showed around the edges.
Yale and Fiona headed back to the living room ahead of him. “He is cute,” Fiona whispered. “Can you give me one reason you shouldn’t seduce him again?”
Yale could think of a couple, but they were already back at Nora’s side, and Roman was coming up behind them.
“You’re lucky I have my wits,” Nora said, “because I do remember what I already told you. We were in 1919, weren’t we.”
Fiona sat next to Yale at the table, and she took Yale’s notepad and pen, wrote in block print: DO IT. He suppressed a laugh, an eleven-year-old-in-synagogue laugh, as she drew a lewd stick-figure coupling.
Roman turned on the tape recorder he’d brought, and Nora began talking about that summer, the way the modeling led to wild parties and long dinners, inclusion in a circle of real artists that hadn’t been available to her as a female student.
“It had been five years,” she said. “I actually believed he’d survived the fighting, because several friends had seen him right at the end. You never knew about the flu, of course. But in any event I’d written him off for lost. Everyone knew he hadn’t claimed his prize.”
She told them about Paul Alexandre, a name Roman seemed familiar with, a patron who’d rented a crumbling mansion and let artists use the house for parties that lasted days.
“There was a lot of cocaine,” she said, and Fiona burst out laughing. “Well, honey, we’d just survived something horrendous, and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Modi was the magnetic center, and he brought me there. Now he was no more than five foot three, and he’d lost a lot of teeth. And he’d fly into rages, which were a product of the TB. And sometimes he’d just cry. He was drawing me one day and he had an absolute temper tantrum about Braque, how Braque was over the horizon, and he was lost in a rowboat. I’m making him sound terrible, but he was tremendously sexy. He’d taken me to Alexandre’s house, and I was quite drunk, and I looked up—and Ranko was standing in the doorway like a ghost.”
Roman gasped aloud, as if the whole story hadn’t pointed to this.
“His right hand was shoved in his pocket, and I didn’t understand that this was because it was ruined, the nerves gone. He hadn’t been shot, so I don’t know what caused the damage, but it might have been psychological. He could move the pinky finger, but not the others.
“I can’t remember the beginning of our conversation—but it ended with the two of us out on the lawn, Ranko yelling that he knew what it meant that I was a model. Now, he was right. He was absolutely right. I never was able to explain to him that modeling was the only way left for me to be an artist. And look, didn’t it work? After all this time, my show is going up!” She laughed and smacked the table.