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  “Natalie,” Frank began, “when you and Bill Fitch first ran this proposal by me last November, my response was enthusiastic. But the more I thought about it, the more concerned I was over the appropriateness of the sites you’d suggested and the security of the artwork. I must say, you’ve definitely allayed my concerns.” As if to reiterate his statement, Frank let his hand rest on the presentation Natalie had sent him last month, with its detailed floor plans and accounts of other public exhibits and their security methods. As Frank looked over his notes, Ed shot a reassuring glance toward Natalie and Jana.

  “After Ed, Marsha, and I considered the proposal and your budget in detail, however, we found ourselves facing other concerns. You list eighteen artists to be included in the exhibition, yet none of them have significant name recognition. We’d like to suggest that you include at least one well-known artist at each site.”

  “Well, The Paperworks Space mission statement declares that our purpose is to exhibit works on paper by artists who use paper as their major medium,” Jana began. “The Artistic Response to the Environment exhibition might draw a wider audience by including well-known artists, but we want to be careful not to override our primary goal. If more established artists were included, we’d have to be extremely cautious in selecting them.”

  “When we present this proposal to our board, we could ask board members to suggest names and assist in any initial introductions,” Frank offered.

  “Instead of one well-known artist at each site, perhaps we could see our way clear to including two or three such artists,” Natalie began, in a conciliatory tone. “Major artists might be appropriate at the more prominent locations, such as the World Trade Center or the Lincoln Center arcade. With careful artistic review, and with input from The Paperworks Space board, we should be able to select prominent artists whose work is appropriate.”

  Jana sucked in her breath. Well-known artists had enormous reservations about showing alongside those less established. Natalie’s suggestion that the invitations come through The Paperworks Space board of directors might work, but someone on their board would have to be owed a lot of favors, and be willing to call them all in. Not to mention the favors they would, in turn, owe members of their board.

  Frank jotted a few notes on his copy of the proposal. “When do you think you might be able to get back to us with artists whose names have the prestige we’re looking for?” he asked.

  Natalie glanced briefly at Jana shifting in her chair, then winged it. “We can assemble our list of names, contact the artists to determine their willingness to participate, and have biographical sketches in your hands in three weeks.”

  “If you can keep to that time schedule, we should have no problem getting the information to our board prior to their April meeting. Now, with regard to your budget,” Frank continued, “you have allocated less than $5,000 for the opening reception. Assuming we fund the exhibition, we envision this as a far more elaborate affair.” He suggested moving the ribbon-cutting ceremony to the World Trade Center and making it an evening cocktail party rather than a lunch-hour reception. “Then, why not follow up with a gala dinner dance at Windows on the World?”

  Natalie, rapidly adding mental figures, felt her head begin to swim. The dinner dance Frank was proposing could easily cost more than they’d budgeted for the entire exhibition and would triple their administrative headaches. “We’ve budgeted for one additional temporary staff person to handle the extra work load, and several of our board members have promised to donate time to help with arrangements, but …”

  “Why not consider dropping the gala from your budget and let our promotion department handle the affair?” Frank might have intended his smile to be reassuring, but Jana read it as patronizing, like his comment that APL could provide introductions to well-known artists. Obviously, he’d already discussed the prospect of taking over promo for the gala with Ed and Marsha; it seemed a fait accompli.

  The next two hours seemed to fly, and before Natalie and Jana realized it the meeting was adjourned. Although Jana had been taken aback by the request for name artists and totally surprised at the proposal to turn the entire gala over to APL’s promotion department, everything had gone well. A few other issues came up, but it seemed as if APL’s foundation staff were behind the proposal. Of course the foundation staff didn’t have the final power, but the board of directors usually went along with their recommendations.

  Jana gave a small sigh and started packing up. Natalie shuffled the floor plan for the Staten Island ferry terminal from hand to hand, rolled it tightly, then passed it to Jana to put away. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I have an appointment at the hairdresser at four-thirty,” she announced.

  “What?”

  “I don’t have time to get back to the gallery first. You can carry these downtown, can’t you, Jana? My hairdresser’s only a few blocks from here. It doesn’t make any sense to go all the way downtown and then be late.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Jana stopped packing and glared at Nat. Not only had they brought the floor plans, but they’d brought two portfolios of representative drawings on the off chance Frank would ask to see them.

  “I didn’t expect the meeting to last this late. I’m sorry.”

  Jana threw up her hands. “At least help me get a cab.”

  “Of course, of course. I won’t abandon you.” Jana heard steps behind her, then looked up to realize Ed had returned. In the few minutes since he’d left the room, he’d unbuttoned his jacket, making him appear less official. Jana found the sight of his slight potbelly more intimidating than the careful corporate demeanor.

  “Let me give you a hand,” he said, carefully rolling one of the plans before she could quite recover from her surprise.

  “Oh great.” Natalie’s voice assumed that super-sweet tone again. “You can get her a cab, can’t you? I’m late for another meeting. Jana, I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” And she was gone.

  “I wonder if you can manage these.” Ed ran his fingers through hair that had gone pure white nearly two decades ago, before he’d turned twenty-five.

  “I’ll manage,” Jana said. Then, laughing nervously, she added, “I’m used to lugging canvases around.” She had to admit that Ed’s sturdy frame was better suited to carrying the portfolios. He probably wasn’t more than five-foot-seven or -eight, but next to Jana he seemed gigantic. “It’s only these plush offices that make me feel so small,” she told herself. The entire annual budget of The Paperworks Space probably didn’t come close to the cost of the furnishings in one of APL’s five conference rooms.

  “I have my car around the corner. If you can wait twenty minutes until I straighten up some things in my office, I’ll drive you downtown,” Ed said. Then, catching her confused reaction, he tried to explain himself: “I don’t usually drive to work, but I was running late this morning, and impulsively decided I wanted the car. Who knows, maybe I even suspected a damsel in distress,” he laughed.

  Jana smiled agreement. A ride downtown would give her a chance to smooth over the scene Ed witnessed. She didn’t want APL to get the wrong impression about her working relationship with Natalie; an incident like this might come up once every six months, but generally they made a good team. She watched him walk down the corridor toward his office, strutting like a peacock. She didn’t like being thought of as a “damsel in distress,” and that stride made her wonder if Ed had been scheming a way to be with her all along. “More than likely, he was thinking about Natalie,” she consoled herself. Choosing attractive friends, like Natalie and Marilyn, was another way in which Jana protected herself against the threat of romantic involvement.

  Ed called the garage, which had his dark green Toyota waiting when they got there. Jana noticed that it was in good shape for a six- or seven-year-old car. As a kid, her father played a game with her, asking her to guess the make and year of every car they passed. In the early fifties they were easier to distinguish.

  Ed opened
the passenger door for her, reaching for her arm to help her into the car. She thrust the portfolios toward him, and he accepted them with one hand while placing his free arm around her. Jana froze. Here we go again, she thought; it might be a different man, but I have the same reaction. She didn’t have the nerve to jerk away. As she stood there it felt as if Ed were pressing one finger, then another, then his entire hand, against her shivering flesh. At first his hand seemed to be all bony knuckles, then she stopped feeling anything, only the pressure, the presence of him next to her. Much heavier than those portfolios would have been. Dead weight.

  At last he stepped aside and let her in, then walked around to the driver’s side. He pushed his way onto the heavily trafficked street the way cabbies did, making the other cars stop and wait for him, while Jana stared out the window, hating this silence. At meetings there was always business to discuss, five or six people with which to make small talk during breaks. Natalie had a talent for small talk. Jana should have remembered how difficult it was for her to relate casually to men; she should have realized she’d be at a loss for words on her own like this.

  The one other time she’d met Ed, at a meeting last month, he’d asked if she were an artist as well as a curator. When she’d told him yes, he’d asked whether her drawings would be included in the exhibition. “I work on paintings, large works,” she’d told him. And Ed had suggested maybe she’d want to do some drawings, since the exhibition was still over a year off. She countered with a brief monologue on the etiquette involved in entering one’s own work in a show one was curating, but felt as if only the plush chairs were listening. Ed also mentioned wanting to see her paintings sometime. He’d probably ask her to “explain” them, she thought, turning her attention to the heavy rush hour traffic.

  She leaned back and tried to relax. The bright sun, reflected off the windows of buildings, made its patterns in her hair. She’d washed it two days ago, so it was all frizzy now, blowing across her forehead, adding to her discomfort. When she’d gone away to camp as a kid, the girls in her bunk were divided into two groups. One group washed their hair on Sundays, the other group on Wednesdays. On Sunday, when Group A washed, she would always claim she’d been put in Group B. When Wednesday came around, she would insist she was in Group A and had just washed. She might have been caught, but she was in the infirmary half the Wednesdays and Sundays anyway. That doctor never seemed to mind, or even notice how dirty her hair was. He’d just lain her there on his cot, not really looking at her … Putting her attention to better use, she wondered if those awful camp memories were part of the reason she never captured her hair in self-portraits.

  Ed rounded the corner onto Prince Street. Jana sat up straight, twirled two fingers through her hair to encourage its ringlet curl, and stiffly uncrossed her legs. Time to become professional again, time to give the gentleman from APL the grand tour of the gallery. Come on, she kept telling herself, put on one of those bright phony smiles you always use for corporate executives and art critics. She’d had a difficult time with that smile, at first—it seemed pretentious, so far from what made art real for her. But she knew it was important, and much as she hated to admit it, she’d become good at it. Pretend Ed’s John Perreault or Peggy Guggenheim, she told herself again. Peggy Guggenheim would have been a cinch. She opened and closed the clasp on her pocketbook, suddenly envious of women who used makeup and had compacts to glance into at times like this.

  Ed found a parking space and she hopped out of the car, accidentally slamming the door. She was fumbling with her keys by the time Ed had gotten the portfolios out of the back. Natalie teased her about weighing her huge pocketbook down with as many keys as a janitor—apparently it wasn’t sexy for women to carry a lot of keys around.

  “Welcome to The Paperworks Space, Main Gallery,” she said as she switched on the lights. In her nervousness, she’d momentarily forgotten that Ed had been here for a meeting, shortly after the exhibition was first proposed. “Welcome back, rather,” she corrected herself.

  Taking one of the descriptive brochures from the window ledge, she held it in front of her face and pretended to check it over before handing it to Ed. “This contains a statement by Lou Daniels, the artist whose drawings are in this room,” she said. “You might recall discussing him at our last meeting. He’s the young rebel graphic artist from San Francisco—this is his first show on the East Coast. Natalie and I are especially excited about introducing him to a wide, general audience through the Artistic Response to the Environment exhibit.”

  Talking quickly, she told him about the artist on exhibition in the two smaller rooms. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll go in the back and get a copy of his promo sheet and price list. There have been more people than usual through here the past few days, and the stack seems to have evaporated.” The exhibition space occupied 1,500 square feet, and Jana was grateful for every blessed inch of it. She let Ed look around alone, taking longer than necessary to gather the information she needed. By the time he’d finished looking at Lou’s work, she was able to thrust the vitae on the other artist into his hands and busy herself with paperwork at her desk.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Ed survey Lou Daniels’ work from room-center, then begin a closer inspection. Even from behind, she could tell his reaction was the same as that of others seeing Lou’s work for the first time. Initially his drawings appear to be architectural blueprints, pencil lines on grid paper. Then it would dawn on the viewer that these blueprints weren’t for buildings; they were for landscapes, with plans for trees, birds, bushes, broken fences. The one Ed was studying now included wind circling one tree and shadows running off the left side of the page.

  His interest in the drawings reassured Jana that she’d been making too much of his attentiveness to her in the car. “I’ll bet he’s envisioning Lou’s work fitting into APL’s concept of the Artistic Response to the Environment exhibition,” Jana guessed. Even though she’d described the artist as a “rebel,” these drawings didn’t shock or offend; there were no nuclear explosions, no radioactive waste dumps. Their original exhibition proposal had included five pages of biographical material about the artists they planned to include, carefully outlining the content of their work and conveying to APL the message that overtly provocative imagery would be carefully avoided, but Jana was delighted to see Ed further reassured by this walk-through.

  He took a quick look at the smaller rooms, then eased his way over to Jana’s desk. “I’m impressed,” he said.

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Which of these two artists do you prefer? Give me your personal opinion.”

  But this wasn’t a personal visit: he was a grants officer for a major corporation, and she wanted to keep a professional veneer to the conversation. “I like them both, but for different reasons.” Jana barely looked up from her papers, for a moment feeling out of place in her own gallery. She shifted her pen from one hand to the other. Ed patiently waited for her to continue. “Lou’s work features a minutely detailed exploration of space. His concentration on depth and perspective makes him perfect for the Central Park boat house, where the windows will add a further dimension. I’ve overheard viewers comment that they want to crawl inside some of his mazes and wander around in them.” To be honest, she found his drawings cold and intellectual, but it was easier for her to talk shop than to think about being alone in the gallery with a man.

  “We have some brochures around from Lou’s other shows, if you want me to hunt for them,” she continued, getting to her feet as she was talking. “A review appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle that I found extremely perceptive.” Lou Daniels was better than most of the artists who exhibited in this gallery, artists with no sense of direction, wanting nothing more than to blend in with the crowd, paint or draw highly salable imitations of what everyone else was drawing. Well, she would have done that if she could have, especially when she’d first moved to the city, she reminded herself. She’d never st
udied art per se, never mastered the techniques of imitation—a blessing in disguise.

  “No, no, don’t bother searching for more material.” Ed was anxious not to lose her under more papers. “You’ve done a more than adequate job of explaining his process.” He stared for a moment at the distant back walls of the gallery.

  Oh Christ, Jana thought. I shouldn’t have gone on so long about Lou’s work. I’ll bet he’s wondering if I pull away when Lou touches my arm. “Yes!” she wanted to scream, “Yes, yes, yes! I pull away from all men!”

  Ed turned and looked out the huge front windows at the street. “As we were driving here, I was noticing how much the neighborhood has changed,” he began. “I wouldn’t mind walking around and exploring a bit. Do you feel like joining me, maybe showing me your favorite places? We could stop for a drink or even dinner …”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got things to finish up here,” Jana said, barely looking at him.

  “Okay, we’ll make it some other time.” This was going to be tricky, he thought. A business lunch to discuss a proposal was one thing, but driving down here he’d begun to realize that his interest in Jana Replansky might go beyond the bounds of his professional responsibilities. He didn’t want Jana to think she had to socialize with him in order to guarantee funding for the proposal, but he understood she might have interpreted his invitation that way. He suddenly felt top-heavy, unsure about the best way to exit gracefully. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, as he reached out to awkwardly shake her hand.

  Jana shuffled through a pile of papers, letting Ed find his own way out. She found herself thinking about Ed’s bald spot. She’d never noticed it before, but as he’d walked out, she’d spotted the classic half-dozen hairs combed carefully over a balding pate. Staring at one of the postcards announcing Lou Daniels’ show, she picked up a pen and wrote in bald spot. A vast improvement. Lou’s work would grow enormously if he could open up, let particulars about people enter his landscapes. He seemed right on the verge of doing that. A year from now, five years from now, there was no telling where he’d be. In one of the larger galleries, more than likely.