Cleopatra and Frankenstein(77)

“This vacuum is really worth being raped and murdered for?” she said.

“Jesus, no one said anything about rape,” said Quentin. “But it is a Dyson Ball Compact with three of the five original heads.” Cleo was quiet, looking at her arm. Quentin exhaled down the phone. “That means yes.”

Cleo let herself be cajoled into meeting him in an hour, felt the relief tinged with resentment that came with doing what other people wanted her to do. She stood in front of her wardrobe, frozen. Just the act of picking something to wear felt insurmountable. Very slowly, she slipped on a pair of jeans. Good, that was half the work done. She picked up one of Frank’s cashmere sweaters and pulled it over her bare torso. It smelled of his cologne, tobacco leaf and spice, and another scent that was uniquely Frank. She tugged it off and put on one of her own sweaters instead. She looked at her shoes. It was bitterly cold outside, boots weather, but she was not sure she could remember how to tie her laces. She pulled on thick socks and cautiously slid her feet into a pair of slip-on sneakers. She was doing well.

Waiting for the elevator, she listened for the neighbor. Often, when walking past his door, Cleo could hear the opera music he liked to play seeping into the corridor. It was a beautiful, soaring sound. But today there was only silence.

When she met him outside his building, Quentin was wearing a midnight-blue silk pajama suit adorned with tiny gold arrows under a large fur coat with a pair of old running sneakers. Quentin had always had the dual ability to make expensive things look like they’d been plucked from dumpsters and inexpensive things look prohibitively expensive.

“Nice pajamas,” said Cleo.

“It’s my Jack Nicholson–goes-to-a-Lakers-game look,” said Quentin pushing a pair of thick-framed gold glasses onto his nose. He eyed her approvingly. “You look thin.”

Cleo had put on Frank’s heavy camel topcoat and cinched it at the waist with one of her vintage belts. She did a little pirouette on the sidewalk in front of him.

“It’s depression!”

Quentin shrugged. “Best diet I know.”

Cleo found she was disappointed that he didn’t bother to inquire further. They were walking toward the end of his block, where traffic was already building up on the avenue. The yellow light of headlamps splashed and pooled in slush puddles along the sidewalk. Quentin checked his phone.

“We’re late.”

“Want to run for this light?”

“Running is for children and thieves,” said Quentin.

He was pulling off his gloves to light a cigarette when his eye caught something across the street. Cleo saw him inhale sharply. Quentin’s face was preternaturally expressive; his emotions seemed to live just below the skin’s surface, like fish that survive in the shallows. His eyebrows alone could register fear, hope, disappointment, relief, in the space of a breath.

“What?” asked Cleo.

“Nothing,” said Quentin. “I thought it was Johnny for a second.”

“Where?” Cleo scanned the other side of the street for Johnny’s orange hair.

“Stop,” he said. “It wasn’t him.”

They waited for the light in silence. It changed, and Quentin strode across ahead of her.

“How is Johnny?” she asked, catching up with him on the other side.

“How should I know?”

“I thought maybe you two still talked.”

A crowd of schoolchildren ran past, trailing shrieks like colorful ribbons of sound behind them. Quentin pivoted to sidestep them, and Cleo saw him grimace just slightly as he turned away.

“Sorry,” she said. “To bring it up.”

Quentin faced her again and bared his teeth in a grin.

“That balding nobody?” He flicked his half-smoked cigarette into an ice-rimmed puddle scarred with light. “He’s already forgotten. Actually, I’m kind of seeing someone.”

Cleo raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“I didn’t know you had a new boyfriend,” she said.

“Alex is not my boyfriend,” retorted Quentin.

“Oooh,” teased Cleo. “It’s Alex, is it?”

“I’ve told you his name before,” said Quentin. “You just don’t remember.”

Cleo frowned. She was fairly sure he had not.

“Look,” continued Quentin. “He’s just this guy I … see sometimes. It’s unpredictable. He’s very dark and Russian.”

“Delightful,” said Cleo.

“I don’t know if I’d call him that,” said Quentin. “But he’s definitely something.”

Cleo gave Quentin a sidelong glance.

“But you’re … good with the situation?” she asked. “He treats you well?”

“What do you care?” he snapped. “You stopped worrying about what I did the moment you married Frank. Don’t act concerned now.”

Quentin announced that they’d arrived with a finality that showed he would not listen to her response. The address the seller sent was in a prewar doorman building on a quiet street near Washington Square. A large Nordic landscape covered one of the lobby walls. Cleo usually found these paintings oppressive, with their dark mountains and shadowed pine forests, but this one had a beautiful gilded frame that reflected on the glossy lacquered floor in a pool of gold. Cleo imagined skating across it, as if across a dark, frozen lake. She thought of a song her mother used to play, a woman singing plaintively about wishing for a river to skate away on … How true that feeling was. Her mother had felt it; now she did too. That was the real inheritance from her mother, she thought, more defining than any facial feature or mannerism. They both wanted to disappear.