Tim Green - Exact Revenge

“You’re an agent?” I ask.

“I am,” he says.

Allen’s face is flushed and he looks at the floor where the toe of his shoe follows a bloodline in the stone.

“Cool under pressure,” Frank says, mussing his hair like he’s ten. “Just like his old man… All right, gotta go. We’ll have to get together.”

Allen watches his father leave, then he turns to me and shrugs.

“I’m sorry he’s so busy,” he says.

“No,” I say, “don’t apologize. A guy like your dad has important things going on. Believe me.”

Allen studies my face and I stare flatly back at him.

“I know you’re in a hurry too,” he says after a blink. “Come on. I’ll let you go, but I promised I’d introduce you to my mom.”

Allen leads me through a great room with deep-cushioned couches and chairs and a marble fireplace I could almost stand up in. The walls are hung with oil paintings-copies, but good ones-and heavy velvet drapes. Over the mantel is a full-length portrait of Lexis standing on a cliff overlooking whitecapped water.

Her figure is straight and streamlined, draped in a deep blue dress that matches her eyes. Her dark hair is being blown back. The sky is roiling with sunbeams and charcoal clouds. Her lips are pressed together, unsmiling, and she stares off.

Allen sees me looking and says, “That’s her. My dad surprised her with that painting. It’s a John Currin. She hates it.”

“Very pretty,” I say.

“She’s quiet,” he says, “but she’s great.”

We leave the big room and walk down a long wide hallway.

“She doesn’t usually let anyone in her studio,” he says. “But when I told her about you and asked if it was okay, she said yes.”

He stops in front of a heavy wood-paneled door, gently raps his knuckles, and then swings it open.

LIKE THE REST OF THE APARTMENT, the ceilings in the studio are twenty feet high. The walls are crowded with framed canvases, reminding me of the Vatican Museum. It must be everything she’s ever painted. I see one work that I recognize from my past life. It’s finished.

Tall arching windows face Park Avenue on the opposite side of the room. At the far end, Lexis stands just out of the sunlight at an easel. Her back is to us, hair up with the wisps of gray. She’s dressed in tan capri slacks, flat shoes, and a man’s dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

Next to her easel a small table is cluttered with tubes of paint and a wineglass, nearly empty and smudged. She stares at the blank canvas in front of her. In one hand is a brush without any paint. Her other hand hangs limp at her side, and when Allen calls softly to her, she makes no indication that she’s heard him.

We cross the room and she is startled by his touch. Allen introduces us. She smiles, but when she takes my hand, the color leaves her cheeks. Her fingers are bony and chilled. Her eyes work their way around my face before she looks into mine.

She drops my hand and says, “Allen says you’re new to the city.”

“I found a place on Fifth Avenue, not too far from the Met,” I say, handing her a card with my home phone number on it. “I’d like to have you and Frank over for dinner sometime. Why don’t you let me know when you’re free?”

“Of course,” she says, clutching the card in her hand and bending it.

She squints her eyes at me and angles her head. Her mouth opens as if she’s going to say something. I look away to study her empty canvas.

“Well,” I say, holding out my wrist to look at my watch. “It was a pleasure, Mrs. Steffano.”

“Just Lexis,” she says in a small voice.

“Lexis. Okay.”

I touch the skin on my face and feel the smooth texture where surgery has built it up and pulled it taut. Allen sees me out. On the street, he thanks me.

“She appreciates what you did,” he says. “I told you she’s just quiet.”

“Allen,” I say with a dismissive wave, “we’re friends, right? She’s very nice.”

“She is,” he says with a broad smile that reminds me more of the Lexis I knew than the one I just saw. “See you tonight.”

I turn and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. It’s as if my legs are asleep and I can barely feel the concrete beneath my feet. She is still beautiful. Older. Sad. But the color of her eyes is the same. Those high cheekbones. And as much as I hate her for what she’s become, the urge to just hold her felt so heavy in my chest that I thought I was going to fall over.

I shake my head and breathe deep. There is a Starbucks around the corner and I go inside and sit down. It takes a few minutes before I get back to myself. But I think of my father and Lester and also of Helena and everything is soon clear again.

I march up Park Avenue through the bustle to the NFL offices. It takes hours of signing papers, but Woody Johnson seems relieved to be free from his football team. Even as a non-sports fan I know that the pressure on the owner of a sports franchise in New York is unique.

The home I bought is one of the original Fifth Avenue uptown mansions, built in the late 1800s by the robber barons of the time, like Frick, Morgan, and Vanderbilt. After an interview about the team with Ira Berkow from the New York Times , I have dinner by myself in the second-floor dining room. Three stone-faced servants hurry in and out. Helena is already at the Garden.

Outside the French doors, I can see the sun as it drops down behind the trees of Central Park. It grows cool enough outside so that moisture beads up on the edges of the glass. I chew mechanically and swallow my lumps of meat without any real pleasure. After a mouthful of wine, I set down my napkin and step out onto the balcony. The smell of fresh tree bark reminds me of another life, when I would turkey hunt as a boy, sitting motionless in the sea of new green leaves, straining my ears and scanning the gray dawn between the silver and black trunks of the trees for a flicker of movement.

I take a cigar from my pocket, and Bert appears like a genie with a wooden match that he strikes up with his thumbnail.

“Thanks,” I say. I can see the ghost of my breath and I put my cigar to the flame.

“My grandmother used to say that winter always breathes its one last breath in June,” he says before the match goes out and his face is lost in the shadow of a tall potted arborvitae. “You want a coat?”

I look away from Bert and across Fifth Avenue. Beneath their crown of new leaves the tree branches are an inky web. It’s impossible to know where one tree ends and the next one begins.

“I don’t get cold,” I say.

“You don’t get hot either,” he says. “Like the water snake.”

I exhale a plume of blue smoke with a slow nod.

“My grandmother always said to me that every man has the spirit of an animal,” Bert says after a pause. “That when our spirits travel from one life to the next, they remember where they were in the last life.”

“I don’t know,” I say, inhaling so that the end of my cigar glows. “I remember my last life pretty well and I wasn’t cold-blooded.”

“What, a running deer?” he asks. “Like your totem?”

“No,” I say, “a white man.”

A cab jams on its brakes and the driver lays on his horn before he roars off down the street, swerving after a black Town Car. After that, I can hear the rattle of Bert’s breathing above the splash of the fountain out front. Then the lights change and the next wave of traffic sweeps past. The clouds are heavy and low, their gray bellies lit by the city’s amber glow.

“She’s an amazing woman,” Bert says.

“Who?”

“Are there two?”

“Helena?”

“I mean more than just because she’s on those posters all over the bus stops,” Bert says.