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  Not at all. She indulged in the solitude, got carried away with it, became annoyed whenever the pickup of the caretaker came rooster-tailing up the road or came thinking he was doing her a service by snowplowing her an access.

  Her talent took hard hold while she was in Cody. One autumn she must have painted the Absaroka Mountains fifty times.

  She saw nature in finer detail and expressed it in masses. Masses that surely weren’t or barely weren’t adjacent. The mountains not adjacent to the sky or the tree line not adjacent to the meadow the way she saw them. And the vitality of everything almost hiding. In her renderings an underlain mass of brilliance usually peeked around the edges of a sullen mass of overlay, the components of reality contributed to the appearance of illusion. She would never be able to paint any other way.

  “I really like your paintings,” Grady told her.

  She doubted he’d even seen one.

  “A business acquaintance in New York has one of your works hung on the prime wall in his office. I coveted it and told him so, but he wouldn’t part with it. I’ve also seen your work in a gallery downtown, on Octavia Street I believe it was.”

  Another point in his favor, Julia thought. Was he ever piling them up!

  In turn Grady told her some about himself, what it had been like growing up in Litchfield. Described his family one by one, told her how his father, a pharmacist, had owned the only drugstore in town and from the prescriptions he filled knew the diagnosed ailments of everyone in the vicinity. The store had had a luncheon counter for toasted cheese sandwiches, milkshakes and fizzed-up, cloud-topped ice cream sodas. His father was retired, sold the store to a chain that had taken out the soda fountain and counter and otherwise modernized the place with too much fluorescent light, Formica shelving and pegboard.

  Grady and Julia got together a lot during the next week. Went across the Bay Bridge for some jazz at Yoshi’s and stayed for only one set because they wanted to talk, not listen. Went to the “Stick” to see the Giants blank the Dodgers. Went out thirty miles to Woodside to the estate called Filoli to marvel at its formal gardens and allow Grady to impress with his knowledge of plants and trees, the Chilean myrtles, the New Zealand beeches. Went to a movie. Grady suggested a newly released comedy that was playing at the Northpoint but didn’t insist when Julia was for a Japanese film at the Gateway called Heaven and Earth, a samurai epic directed by Haruki Kadokawa. Slashing of swords, decapitations and struttings, subtitles that seemed contradictory to the overemphatic dialogue. Grady found the film colorful, tried to get a hold on the plot. Julia, on the other hand, seemed as though she understood every word and nuance, sat enrapt throughout.

  Friday night Grady purposely stayed away from her. He hadn’t said he’d see her or promised to phone. He grabbed a slice and a Pepsi at a pizza place on Pacific and drifted downhill to Geary. At Pat O’Shea’s Mad Hatter he stood at the bar with a double Glenfiddich. Eyes aimed up at the baseball on television but not much registering. He was getting into Julia Elkins way too deep and too fast, he told himself. No matter that he didn’t feel as though he was being irrational, there was no denying that he was on the emotional ricochet and prone to making another huge mistake.

  He hadn’t given Gayle a thought all week. Julia had chased Gayle, swept out the remnants of her. To that extent Julia had been good, but it didn’t mean he needed Julia. Need was a big admission. Anyway, he thought, being out alone tonight was a way of gauging what was what. He felt fine in his space. If he were to lop the last week or so out of his life, have amnesia about it or whatever, it wouldn’t be that big a deal; he wouldn’t have missed much, just Julia.

  Fuck you, just.

  At eleven he was all out of resistance, went to the pay phone. Her voice went into his ear and down to his knees and got to everything else along the way.

  “How late is it?”

  He told her.

  “I was getting ready for bed,” she said. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

  No one except his mother had ever asked caring like that. “I just thought I’d say good night. I’m fine.”

  “What did you do today?”

  “Leased an office for one thing.”

  “I know you mentioned you’d been looking. Is it what you want?”

  “It’ll do. Can we get together tomorrow?”

  “I was planning on painting tomorrow. If I don’t paint I’ll get stiff.”

  “Can I come watch you paint?”

  “I’ve never painted for an audience. Probably it’s something better done alone.”

  “Seems like it would be.” There she was, he thought, not a lot of miles away but near enough to walk to. So, why couldn’t he be with her? Too late tonight, too busy tomorrow. He’d heard of and known women who enjoyed the getting but not the having. Was she one of those? Should he risk asking her about the day after tomorrow?

  “Do you really want to come watch me paint?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll get bored.”

  “What time shall I be there?”

  “Whenever you want, just come.”

  Much happier, he had another drink and went home, which was now the week by week affordable hotel room on Fillmore Street. Didn’t sleep solidly, kept waking and seeing if it was tomorrow. Got up at three and watched Gleason reruns until four. Got up for good at six-thirty. He had in mind waiting until ten. Parked down the hill from Julia’s and read the morning paper as long as he could. Shortly after nine he drove up and parked in her driveway. Thinking he was early and his eagerness obvious. He went around the side to the studio entrance. The door was open and she was at the easel.

  She stopped work and got him some coffee. He’d already had four strong cups, two more than usual, and was sure another would give him the rattles. She sat him on one of the high stools at the big table and went back at it. He thought it proper not to make conversation, although he had a lot he wanted to say to her, told himself not to abuse this privilege of sharing what normally was a private time for her. His attention was ambivalent, interested in the paint colors mixed and applied as though they were her internal garden, and taken with her, her intensity as she focused or contemplated, stepped back and appraised. He didn’t realize how much tone her body had built up until she took a momentary break and he saw the letdown, a minor collapse.

  “I usually paint in the nude,” she said lightly. “And until recently I’ve been quite sloppy. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. All at once I seem compelled to be neat. Look, not a dribble or even a drop.”

  She was barefoot, had on a gauzy white cotton skirt that wasn’t quite opaque and a blue-and-white striped cotton boy’s shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the elbow and its front unbuttoned four down. She came over to the table with a brush in hand, reached for a Pepperidge Farm oatmeal raisin.

  It was as if Grady had promised his arms that the next time she was within range they could have their way. One of his arms pulled her to him, the other went around and surely captured. For an instant Grady was eyes-to-eyes with her, able, it seemed, to hear her eyes. Her pupils were dilated with want, declaring it.

  That first kiss was not all crush and feeding. There was adequate sureness in it to allow prelusion, lips reaching on their own to achieve the slightest touch, brushing as lightly as possible, back and forth, while tongues remained contained, pink, slick animals poised in their lairs.

  The kiss lasted even when it hesitated, even when it was not a touching kiss it was bound by anticipation and with breaths mixing. Julia hadn’t ever felt so strong and yet weak. For Grady the same. Aroused and in the darkness of their kissing, in the parrying of tongues, the sucking exchanges, Grady was told by everything within him, like the voice of his blood and all his organs and fibers, that this was not merely sex.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered and led him up to her bedroom, where she threw off the covers completely and transformed the bed into a plain, sheeted tract for loving. He paid no attention t
o his own undressing, did not deny himself the part of it that was the observing of her removing what little she had on, the arming out of the boy’s shirt, the undoing and dropping of her skirt and her stepping from the circle of it. Her fingers were his allies. He was surprised but grateful that she wasn’t inhibited.

  Actually, Julia had never been so entirely shameless. It was as though some membranous constraint had been removed, leaving her exempt of guilt, released to range the entire realm of sensation, whatever pleased. Exercising such total latitude, she reached down and felt herself, felt how gorged were the exterior lips down there, puffed apart to create between them a wettened crease, reigned over by her clitoris, usually reticent but now erect, demanding to protrude, insisting to be touched.

  He came to her, his erection unwieldy, like an antenna determining the way, and it was then between them, embraced against the skin of his stomach and the skin of hers, and she slid both her hands into that vise from the left and the right to claim it.

  He resisted the extreme hurry he felt, asked his awareness to register surely the surroundings, the fragrance of her, the faint apathetic sounds of the city in motion, the form of her shoulder blades, the small of her back, the ladder of her spine. As though he was supplying a private time capsule before he was beyond the point of any such objectivity.

  The slash of sunlight upon the sheet was upon them. They lay against each other full length, gently pressured. Both were grateful that this first time was in the bright time of day, allowing eyes their due participation.

  She kneeled up beside him so her eyes could travel him, his various planes, and transitions, neck to shoulder to chest to abdomen. It seemed she could hear the speed of his blood, the high-pitched, sustained note of his passion. Watched his chest heave bellowlike, his abdomen go concave with tension, his effort to keep his eyes open as her fingers traced his erection, length and breadth, and especially the taut, finest skin of all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They were, all that day and night, lost in the loving land.

  The following day, Sunday, they tacitly agreed on replenishment but were constantly reassuring each other with spontaneous touches, arms around, smiles. They refrained from declarations of love, kept those words nearly said in their throats while they were being surely said in their eyes. Time would tell, they felt. In fact, time was telling.

  They drove down to Market Street for Julia to see the office Grady had leased. Two rooms on the second floor of 760, the Phelan Building, the same where Harold Havermeyer so extensively occupied the top. Grady’s new office was in the rear, its windows shadowed by the heights of close-by structures. The previous tenants had been two Armenian brothers, specialists in cutting and polishing. One could see the scars of their labor on the bare floor, where their workbenches had been anchored and where oil had too often dripped and permeated. One plaster wall was thoroughly splattered with oil. And in another place there were crumbling gapes where the supports of a heavy shelf had been torn out.

  Seeing the space now for the second time and with Julia along, Grady had misgivings. It wasn’t only that it diminished his feelings of self-importance, the space also presented less than ideal conditions under which to evaluate precious gems. He’d known that he probably could have done better elsewhere, however he’d thought it best that he be located there in the Phelan, where the trade was centered.

  Julia looked thoroughly about both rooms, considered them for a long moment. “Don’t fret, love,” she told Grady, “paint will do wonders, just wait and see.”

  His office became her project. She didn’t exclude him from it but neither did she always consult him either. She chose the paint, a bright but somewhat kind white. And the carpeting, an industrial sort but not entirely tech, gray with a small geometric black and white for the impression of texture. She saw to it that the plastering was done and that more than an adequate number of fluorescent lighting fixtures were installed, the same as she had in her studio, the kind that simulated daylight. Instead of settling for merely Levolor blinds on the two windows she added a major touch of elegance with some amply swagged portieres, edged with tassels and held back with wide matching braids. She also arranged for the leasing of office furniture, chose pieces as understated and as indestructible as possible.

  Grady was overwhelmed by her enthusiastic interest. He thought it a bit strange that she should get so caught up in it. Not just involved but avidly so, to the point of appearing driven. It was as though she personally had a great deal at stake. He didn’t dwell upon it or find fault but heeded his heart and easily convinced himself it was just her way of demonstrating her caring feelings for him.

  Meanwhile he was buying some of the equipment he’d need, such as a Mettler PL 1000C electronic scale, a 10x to 90x Bausch & Lomb microscope and, most important, a really safe safe, an SLS12, insurance rated AAA.

  The day when the office was being painted Grady arrived shortly before noon to find Doris as well as Julia up on ladders rolling it on. Doris greeted him with a warm smile but indicting eyes.

  “I quit Havermeyer,” she told him.

  Julia had on jeans. Doris had on a skirt, and, up on the ladder as she was, her slender, ideal legs were hardly ignorable. Grady tried to refrain from looking up as he asked, “Why? Why’d you quit?”

  “I couldn’t take another second of queen titless,” Doris replied, “and I figured you’d be needing someone. As a matter of fact,” she said pointedly, “I thought you’d be needing someone a lot more than you evidently do.”

  Julia shot Grady a glance and a grin.

  Grady told Doris, “I can’t afford you.”

  “That’s okay, you will be able to down the road a ways and I’m willing to chance the trip. I’ve saved up for just this sort of opportunity.”

  “You mean emergency.”

  “I mean what I said,” Doris contended.

  Julia liked Doris for that.

  “On one condition,” Doris added for Julia’s benefit, “no sexual harassment.” Feigning all business, she dipped the roller into the tray and slathered a swath onto the ceiling. Later, however, when she had the chance, she told Grady, “Some sidekick you are. I wait years for a go at you and before I can say either yes or please, you go and let someone else have her way with you.”

  Grady shrugged.

  “You in love with her?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “I can understand why. She’s nifty. But if it goes sour all I ask is you give my sugar a try. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Grady said, sure it would never come to that.

  So, the office was completed, all the way to the softening of corners with plants and Grady’s name on the door, which Julia watched a professional sign painter do with critical interest. Still lacking were paintings for the walls and an inventory of gems.

  Julia remedied the bare walls with several paintings on loan from her personal collection. All but the prime wall to the right of his desk. That was reserved, she said, for a work in progress.

  As for the inventory, Grady could hardly do business without it. The most he could do was “middle” some deals, that is, find out what someone was in the market for, then, through contacts, find it, have it memoed out, put an acceptable higher price on it, and thus earn a margin.

  Grady called around to people he knew in the trade. A few responded as they should have, promised to help supply Grady with some goods. Most, however, had been contacted by Harold Havermeyer, who, in his slick way, had sown the rumor that Grady had been let go because of an impropriety too despicable to mention, one so flagrant, in fact, that daughter Gayle could no longer tolerate him and had resorted to divorce. Thievery was insinuated. The most serious breach of code. “Trust him at your own risk,” were Harold’s words.

  As trustful as people in the gem trade tended to be it didn’t take much to make them distrust. It was the nature of the business.

  One morning Grady and Harold were the only passengers in an elevator at 76
0 Market. Harold chinned up aloofly, fixed his eyes straight ahead.

  Grady couldn’t resist. “Harold,” he asked, “isn’t that shit on the corner of your mouth?”

  Harold flushed and gritted.

  Grady made fists in his pockets and got out on two.

  He needed capital. Having been merely an employee of HH all those years, he had no commercial credit. He went to several banks and filled out their applications, which made him realize how unqualified he was for any sizeable loan. No collateral, no previous similar loan history, insurmountable sins according to their way of looking at it. A couple of banks, including the branch of one where he’d kept his account, were willing to extend him a high-interest, short-term personal loan of twenty thousand, but that was all.

  While at his bank he removed whatever was of value from his safety-deposit box. His sunny day things was how he’d always thought of them, a little eclectic horde that he’d acquired over the years from estate sales and other opportunities. Including a set of English art nouveau gold and sapphire buttons, a ruby pendant signed by Vever, another signed by Manboussin, and still another rare and very good one signed by René Lalique, a gold coin struck by Septimius Severus to commemorate the games held in Rome in A.D. 206, a 1921 Cartier bedside clock in lavender guilloche enamel, an Audemars Piquet pocket watch and a circa 1850 Carlo Giuliano bracelet comprised of red and green garnets.

  Grady estimated the lot was worth at least a hundred and fifty thousand. He took the pieces first to a retail dealer on Grant Avenue who specialized in such merchandise. The dealer put on the usual buying face, straight and dubious, and acted as though he was doing Grady a favor by merely looking at the things. Actually, he looked at them very carefully and his appreciation was apparent. He sternly offered seventy-five thousand, take it or leave it.

  Grady surprised the man by leaving it. Walked six blocks to Pine Street and another retail dealer, a tall, snooty woman who said right off and too quickly that she liked some things and not others and was probably interested only in the Giuliano bracelet. She kept mumbling that she doubted the authenticity of most of the hallmarks and signatures although, she admitted, the Cartier clock was definitely Cartier. When she thought she’d sufficiently disparaged the goods she offered ninety thousand, and, when Grady packed up and headed out, she capitulated with a hundred and twenty-five.