Henry blushes, wiping at his skin. “Yeah,” he says, “besides that.”

She shrugs. “Not really.”

But it’s there, in her eyes, that unmistakable shimmer, a faint and iridescent film that seems to spread as she studies him. “Really? Nothing?”

She pulls a book from the shelf. “Henry, what do you want me to say?” she asks, searching for a second. “You look like you.”

“So you don’t…” He doesn’t know how to ask. “You don’t want me, then?”

Bea turns, and looks at him for a long moment, and then bursts out laughing.

“Sorry, hon,” she says when she catches her breath. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re cute. But I’m still a lesbian.”

And the moment she says it, he feels absurd, and absurdly relieved.

“What’s this about?” she asks.

I made a deal with the devil and now whenever anyone looks at me, they see only what they want. He shakes his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“Well,” she says, adding another book to her stack, “I think I found a new thesis.”

She carries the books back up to the counter, and spreads them out on top of the ledgers and receipts. Henry watches her turn through the pages until she finds what she’s looking for in each, then steps back, so he can see what she’s found.

Three portraits, all of them renditions of a young woman, though they clearly come from different times and different schools. “What am I looking at?” he asks.

“I call her the ghost in the frame.”

One is a pencil sketch, the edges rough, unfinished. In it, the woman lies on her stomach, tangled in sheets. Hair pools around her, and her face is little more than panes of shadow, a faint scattering of freckles across her cheeks. The title of the piece is written in Italian.

Ho Portado le Stelle a Letto

The English translation sits beneath.

I Took the Stars to Bed.

The second piece is French, a more abstract portrait, done in the vivid blues and greens of Impressionism. The woman sits on a beach, a book facedown on the sand beside her. She looks over her shoulder at the artist, only the edge of her face visible, her freckles little more than smudges of light, absences of color.

La Sirène, this one is called.

The Siren.

The last piece is a shallow carving, a silhouette sculpture shot through with light, pinpoint tunnels burrowed through a pane of cherry wood.

Constellation.

“Do you see it?” asks Bea.

“They’re portraits.”

“No,” she says, “they’re portraits of the same woman.”

Henry lifts a brow. “That’s a stretch.”

“Look at the angle of her jaw, the line of her nose, and the freckles. Count them.”

Henry does. In every image, there are exactly seven.

Bea touches the first and second. “The Italian one’s from the turn of the nineteenth century. The French one is fifty years later. And this one,” she says, tapping the photo of the sculpture, “this one’s from the sixties.”

“So maybe one was inspired by the other,” says Henry. “Wasn’t there a tradition of—I forget what it was called, but basically visual telephone? One artist favored something, and then another artist favored that artist, and so on? Like a template.”

But Bea is already waving him away. “Sure, in lexicons and bestiaries, but not in formal schools of art. This is like putting a girl with a pearl earring in a Warhol, and a Degas, without ever seeing the Rembrandt. And even if she became a template, the fact is, this ‘template’ influenced centuries of art. She’s a piece of connective tissue between eras. So…”

“So…” echoes Henry.

“So, who was she?” Bea’s eyes are bright, the way Robbie’s sometimes are when he’s just nailed a performance, or done a bump of coke, and Henry doesn’t want to bring her down, but she’s clearly waiting for him to say something.

“Okay,” he starts, gently. “But Bea, what if she was no one? Even if these are based on the same woman, what if the first artist simply made her up?” Bea frowns, already shaking her head. “Look,” he says, “no one wants you to find your thesis topic more than I do. For the sake of this store, as much as your sanity. And this all sounds cool. But didn’t your last proposal get nixed for being too whimsical?”

“Esoteric.”

“Right,” says Henry. “And if a topic like ‘Postmodernism and its Effects on New York Architecture’ was too esoteric, how do you think Dean Parrish will feel about this?”

He gestures to the open texts, the freckled faces staring up from every page.

Bea looks at him in silence for a long moment, and then at the books.

“Fuck!” she shouts, taking up one of the giant books and storming out of the shop.

Henry watches her go and sighs. “Not a library,” he calls after her, returning the rest to their shelves.

New York City

March 18, 2014

IX

Henry trails off, as the realization dawns.

He’d forgotten about Bea’s attempt at finding a new thesis, one quiet detail mixed into a very loud season, but now, it’s obvious.

The girl in the sketch, the painting, the sculpture, is leaning on the rail beside him, her face open in delight.

They are walking through Chelsea on the way to the High Line, and he stops, halfway through a crosswalk, realizing the obvious truth, the gleam of light, like a tear, in his story.

“It was you,” he says.

Addie flashes a dazzling smile. “It was.”

A car honks, the flashing sign gone solid in warning, and they run to the other side.

“It’s funny, though,” she says as they climb the iron steps. “I didn’t know about the second one. I remember sitting on that beach, remember the man with his easel, up on the pier, but I never found the finished piece.”

Henry shakes his head. “I thought you couldn’t leave a mark.”

“I can’t,” she says, looking up. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”

“But no photographs. No film.”

Her expression falters, just a fraction. “No,” she says, the word a shape on her lips. And he feels bad for asking, for drawing her back to the bars of her curse, instead of the gaps she’s found between them. But then Addie straightens, lifts her chin, smiles with an almost defiant kind of joy.

“But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?”

They reach the High Line just as a gust of wind blows through, the air still edged with winter, but instead of folding in against him, sheltering from the breeze, Addie leans into the wild gust, cheeks blushing with the cold, hair whipping around her face, and in that moment, he can see what every artist saw, what drew them to their pencils and their paint, this impossible, uncatchable girl.

And even though he’s safe, both feet firmly on the ground, Henry feels himself begin to fall.