Free Ariel's Crossing by Bradford Morrow

routine. Mornings, she strode up Broadway, passing through Union Square with its statues of Washington on horseback and Gandhi carrying his humble staff. She walked with shoulder bags full of manuscripts—a studious burro with panniers, she liked to joke—crosstown to the West Thirties. At the publishing house where she worked she’d recently been promoted from editorial assistant to assistant editor, a titular hopscotch that brought her little more money but twice the work. Which she didn’t mind. She felt lucky to have a window in the cluttered niche that served as her office and everyone else’s file closet. From it she could see other glass and steel buildings, like a colossal forest of quartz crystals, when glancing up from the page at hand. If her budget allowed, she ate lunch at a soba restaurant with other women from the office. An apple and yogurt on solo days. Evenings, she retraced her steps, stopping by a favorite bookstore to browse the new-arrivals table. Some nights she went out with friends, but often she settled in with the book of the moment or her journal, which she filled with word sketches, ideas toward a narrative of her own.
    Ariel’s friendship with her parents continued uninterrupted, almost as if nothing had happened. She looked forward as much as ever to Sunday night dinners with them in Chelsea. She and Jessica cooked ratatouille or pasta primavera while Brice uncorked wine and parodied the news in preposterous Elizabethan doggerel. This prime minister was a whoreson dog. That defense contractor a boodle of lily-livered knaves.
    So yes, she not only went on loving the father she knew, but went on liking him as one of her two oldest pals. She admired him as ever for his outmoded lefty politics, his amused cynicism about how readily his generation had sold out, cashed in, traded tie-dyes for pinstripes. All those doves become bulls and bears. All those dreamy hippies now weighing their retirement options. A defense attorney, Brice was committed to representing idealists, pacifists, protestors in need of legal help. Ethical remained the word for him, Ariel believed. For both her parents, despite their one grand mistruth, now expunged from the record.
    This routine was toppled one night as she stood in the stacks of the Strand. She was poring over a volume of Stieglitz nudes of the youthful Georgia O’Keeffe. Torsos, thighs, breasts, those sinuous hands and sharp black eyes of the painter were caught in silverprints cropped so tightly that they seemed about to burst from the page. Absorbed by these images, Ariel didn’t hear him the first time he said, “She looks like you, her face, that is …”—David Moore’s gawky pickup line they would both laugh about later.
    Over the months that followed, it would occur to Jessica that her daughter was ironically behaving like some jilted lover on the rebound, an impression she didn’t share with Ariel at the time. To every other watching eye she was simply a young woman who had fallen in love with someone who seemed equally in love with her. They went to the Cloisters, strolled hand in hand through the knot gardens adjacent, and kissed beneath the flowering trees. They admired the unicorn in captivity, woven into voluminous tapestry, and looked at the griffin and kissed some more, and at the gargoyles and kissed again. And like the espaliered quinces trained by the monastery gardeners to grow in intertwining patterns, they lay in each other’s arms on Ariel’s bed. She had never explored a man’s body with such abandon. From her mouth came words and from her throat noises she’d never uttered before. Outrageously, she painted his initials on her forehead with her menstrual blood. What began in bed might end up on the floor or in another room, she couldn’t remember how.
    They boarded the Circle Line like a couple of giddy tourists and rode the boat around the island. They went out dancing at night, throwing their arms over their heads and