Free A Certain Age by Beatriz Williams

direction.
    â€œOf course I don’t want to talk about art,” I say. “I employ a curator for that.”
    The Boy flinches. He’s turned away from me, rummaging through the basket for the second bottle of wine, and he straightens now and turns, bottle dangling from one hand and cigarette from the other. His face is terrible. “What are you saying, Theresa?” he says quietly.
    â€œOh, let’s not fight.”
    â€œBecause I did what you asked. I went and took time off from work to deliver your crazy ring—”
    â€œIt wasn’t my ring.”
    â€œBut you asked me to do it, and I did. I delivered the ring, I had lunch. It was a nice lunch. They’re a good family, a sweet good-looking pair of girls. I left after an hour and went back to work and sold a few ten-year government bonds to a lawyer in Scarsdale. What else do you want to know, Theresa?”
    â€œNothing,” I whisper.
    â€œNothing.” He sets the bottle on the table, but he doesn’t open it. “It’s always nothing with you, isn’t it? Just sex and nothing else. You have a curator to talk art with, a dressmaker for your dresses, a husband to pay for the whole racket. And what am I?”
    You’re everything.
    I snatch my cigarette from the ashtray. “Oh, Boyo, you’ve gone and turned all serious on me. I was just teasing. You can flirt with all the pretty girls you like. I don’t give a damn. What we have is something else, and it suits us perfectly, doesn’t it? So don’t go ruining things with all your maudlin talk about dressmakers and husbands.”
    The Boy stands there watching the fluttering of my hand as it maneuversthe cigarette, and he might be a granite statue, he might be the Old Man of the Mountain, if the Old Man had a full head of hair and a firm young face stained with agitation on the extreme outer edges of his cheekbones. He returned from France bearing a number of injuries—if you peer between the unbuttoned edges of his shirt, for example, you can see a shiny patch of skin across his chest where the flames from an engine fire caused his jacket to ignite, and a pinkish-white triangle where a broken rib punctured his skin—but not one bullet or strut or strafe touched his face. I suppose you could call that a miracle. Or luck. The Boy has luck, for all his multitude of scars. He’s still alive, after all.
    â€œSit down, won’t you?” I say. “Open the wine like a good boy.”
    He eases downward and grasps the bottle. A juicy red Burgundy, a 1912 Gevrey-Chambertin from the limitless Marshall cellars. (Now don’t cluck your tongue at me; it’s not illegal to drink the stuff, you know, just to sell it.) The Boy sets the bottle on the edge of the chair, between his legs, and reaches for the corkscrew.
    â€œI don’t know what you’ve got against her,” he says, driving slowly into the cork.
    â€œI haven’t got anything against her.”
    â€œYou have.” The cork slides out. He sets down the corkscrew and lights another cigarette, which he sticks between his lips while he pours my glass and then his. “You know, I see pretty girls all the time. I saw them when I was a kid in Connecticut, I saw them in France. I see them every day on the streets of New York. Dime a dozen.” He hands me the wine. “You’re the one who’s married. You’re the one with a husband.”
    â€œOh, you’re not jealous of him . . .”
    â€œI am. I sure am. I think to myself, Why does she stay married to him? And then I think, Well, what have I got to offer her? Just me. No money, no name, no apartment on Fifth Avenue.”
    â€œNo, Boyo. You’re much more than that.”
    â€œReally? Because you just told me I wasn’t. So which is it?”
    â€œThe second,” I whisper.
    He shakes his head. “Do you know what I thought, that first time I saw you at the van der