An Ambiguous Weekend — Part Six

“I like your paperweight,” the girl said. She sipped the white wine. She held up the red wine. “I’m holding this for someone in the bathroom,” she said.

“Ah…” Richard said. He held up his sculpture. He looked at it, then at her. She was waiting for some declaration. “Um, do you like this?” he asked, and before she could reply he continued talking. “I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s not useful. It doesn’t work. It can’t even stand upright.” To illustrate, he set it on the girl’s leg near the hem of her skirt, and it fell on the floor.

“Oops,” she said. “It fell down.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Like Saddam… Like London Bridge.”

“Like the leaning tower of Pisa,” the girl said.

“No,” Richard said. “Not like the tower of Pisa. The tower of Pisa is merely ‘leaning.’ It is not going to fall. After a certain amount of time it may even reverse directions, and lean the other way. It is merely ‘rocking.’”

The girl laughed. “What do you do?” she asked.

“You know what?” Richard said. “I don’t do much of anything. Not in this world. I’m an artist.”

She smiled. “Could you do my portrait?” she asked.

Richard frowned. “It wouldn’t work,” he said. “Everyone wants Mona Lisa eyes. Everyone wants her smile. But your glasses would make a glare on the canvas.” He made a vague painting motion with his right hand.

The girl laughed again. “I could take them off.”

“Then you wouldn’t be able to see me,” he said. “Your face would be blurry. No one would recognize you.”

“But I can see without these,” the girl said. “I’m just farsighted. I can hardly read a menu, even.” She put down one wine glass and took her eyeglasses off with her free hand. Her bare eyes looked suddenly vulnerable.

“If you were farsighted,” Richard said, “then what are you doing here? Why are you wasting your time in a place like this?” He gestured around them at the party in general. The girl shrugged, and put her glasses back on. She drank the last of the white wine.

“Did you drive here?” she asked.

Richard paused, trying to understand. “No,” he said.

The girl smiled again. “Then no one is counting on you,” she said. “I drove myself. I like art. Do you want to come home with me and watch a movie?”

For Richard this was too bizarre to be a dream, but it couldn’t be real. He had the uncanny feeling that, no matter what he said, it would make sense at this moment but not before or after.

“You’re Italian,” he said. “Aren’t you drunk?”

“Sure,” she said. “But on culture. Half on wine and half on culture. Do you want to go?”

In her car, Richard glanced once in a while at the powder of snow that clung to the hood. He didn’t worry that his luck might be “too” bad. He even wanted to exaggerate the likelihood of icy patches on the road, as if that were a specific solution to some vague problem. He didn’t try to guess what might go through Liz’s mind when she would look for him and then drive home alone. After their initial “fling” he had never bothered to wonder what she thought. Richard knew that he would only think a couple of thoughts with the young lady, whose name he promised himself he would never repeat. One of these thoughts was that, sometime before morning came to “save him,” he would probably feel like going outside to sit by himself in the snow, by this road.