Activity

“Hold my hand,” he said. She considered the hand but did not. He moved his head toward her. The flesh slid on the jaw.

She waited. She smiled at him. Buildings were sun-shocked in the corners of her eyes.

“Ah,” he said. A warmth moved into his face. The almost joke in it had returned. “She wo…

“Oh, I know,” said Sallie. And Lotto beamed with pleasure, preening, eyes darting around to see which kind soul in the room could have sent along the champagne, the force of his delight such that wherever his eyes landed, the recipients of the gaze would look up out of their food and conversation, …

“I like your necklace,” the girl whispered.

Mathilde put her hand up to her neck, touched it. It was gold, with a large emerald, which Ariel had given her last Christmas. The green was meant to go with her eyes; but her eyes were changeable. She took it off her neck and put it on Rachel’s. “It’s…

“To tell you the truth, I wanted to meet you almost as much as I wanted to meet him,” Land said.

“Why?” she said. She was blushing. Flirting? It wasn’t impossible.

“You’re the untold story,” he said. “The mystery.”

“What mystery?” she said.

“The woman he chose to spend his life with,” L…

She had a self she didn’t devote to him. For one thing, she wrote, and not just invisibly in his manuscripts, which he must have thought magically tidied themselves up in the night. She wrote her own things that she kept to herself: surreptitious, sharp objects part story, part poetry. Published un…