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Reticence.

From the fourth seat in the second row I'll be almost perfectly aligned with the podium. Since it's almost an hour before the reading starts, and I've picked out where I'm going to sit, I nervously browse. Reading titles from the book spines, authors, and publishing houses silently. Calming, calming. I'm able to avert an episode of tachychardia (Jean's branding) before reaching the C's.

Seated. Waiting. I grip the new copy of More Things I've Wanted protectively, yet careful not to get sweat smudges on the jacket. I try to read the table of contents but only get as far as "Astrology Aside: Why Relationships Spontaneously Combust" before having to close the book and count backwards in French from one hundred: "cent, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, quatre-vingt-dix-huit, quatre-vingt-dix sept, quatre-vingt-dix-seize..." (a tip from Eileen Gray's first book) until acidity rolls back down again.

She strides down the aisle between the banks of folding chairs, amid thunderous applause, like she's gliding. From her post at the podium, she is luminous -- radiant -- glowing. Her hair hangs behind her, brushing her shoulders, billowing for miles, so blonde, and she pushes it back, sliding both hands into it -- smiles gratefully -- she's saying thank you and motioning for the audience to subsist -- I follow her lead -- when the roar drops lowly enough:

"This is... well, ... this has to be one of the most... truly boisterous of receptions..." A couple in the front row chuckles and Eileen Gray responds: "No, seriously. I can tell right now, book or not, this, well..." She smiles. "Maybe I should just start?"

She begins to read. It's perfect. This blue light beams down on her and washes over all of us-- it's hypnotic -- it takes on different shades: there's brilliant and cerulean and cobalt and phthalocyanine and ultramarine and carribean and a turquoise that reminds me of being five years old -- all in perfect accord with the pacing and rhythm of her voice. The chapter she reads flawlessly -- an anecdote about a boyfriend and how he refused to drive anywhere -- I know this story -- she alluded to it in the first book -- and this guy was completely wrong for her, she intones, he liked to eat pizza and may have been a republican but more likely a nazi but really what is the difference? and only used the big forks and couldn't give her an orgasm without going down on her but was always so sloppy about it and was completely incorrigible as a tipper in restaurants.

Now the light is pink -- reddish -- and she questions the audience -- the question was not why but where and when. She pauses at the end, reaches for a small bottle of water, and the audience claps wildly.

And I tarry, sort of, in approaching -- I let all these housewives and professors queue up first, remaining seated. I watch Eileen Gray intently: how she graciously accepts the compliments, smiles and leans forwards to shake hands or confirm personalization spellings. Several freezes for eager, smooth-moving photographers. We make eye contact several times. We share a sigh as the blonde girl with tiny legs ushers away an elderly woman carrying a handful Eileen Gray's headshots she probably bought on eBay and hardcover editions, who tries to reach out and grab onto Eileen -- the blonde girl practically has to pry her off -- and when the situation is over we look at each other. Her eyes say god can you believe this? It's so overwhelming.

I push my copy toward her when it's my turn. I'm shaking and sucking in breaths. She smiles reassuringly.

"Thanks for coming," she says, reading the Post-it stuck to the jacket flap, "Robert."

"You've written some really amazing things," I say. I step to the side and the line continues.

"Thank you," she says. "I feel like a big idiot up here sometimes, but you know." She opens another copy that a woman passes forward, signing it with a Sharpie.

"So you're right handed," I say, peering down at her hands. "I always imagined you'd be left."

"Really?" she asks, leaning towards me. She smiles at a professor after he drops his glasses and fumbles to pick them up, nervous and embarrassed.

"Yeah," I nod. "So, what are you doing after this?"

"Why?" she asks. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," I say. "I mean, I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink or something."

She contemplates this for a moment and then shrugs, stretching her arms behind her back. "Yeah," she says. "Sure." She peers out beyond the table, craning her neck. "I can't find that Deborah," she says.

"Who?"

"My editor."

"Oh, well, you know, if you're busy," I hedge.

"No," she says. "I'd like to."

"I'm Robert," I say. "By the way."

"Right," she says. "Eileen, but you knew that already." We shake hands again.

"It's nice to meet you," I say.

Then there are no more books to sign. All the folding chairs are empty. Maintenance men begin vacuuming around us.

Bonding.

It's practically empty in Gary Barnett's. Eileen Gray smokes Marlboro Lights and checks messages on her cell phone. We're drinking wine. I start to feel like I've been looking at her for too long. She closes her phone.

"What?" she asks. "You're staring at me in a funny way."

"Nothing," I say, folding my hands, gazing into her eyes longingly for a second before cracking up. "This is all just, well, you know..."

"Ineffable?" she suggests. "Surreal?"

"Well, yes, in a lot of ways," I concede.

"That's good," she says, nodding, reaching for her wine glass, signaling the bartender.

"You know it's too late when you can say how you feel."

"Do you want something to eat?"

"Yeah, that sounds nice."

She pays our bar tab, without examining the itemization, with a credit card that has somebody else's name on it.

"I'd like a chicken pot pie," she says, after I ask her where she'd like to go.

"We could go to Baker's Square," I offer, tentatively.

She laughs. "I haven't been to one since grad school."

"If you don't--"

"--No," she retorts. "That sounds perfect."

We board a taxi, one of three idling in the Omni's circular driveway, and I give the driver directions to Touhy and Western in Chicago.

"I'm having a hard time telling the difference between Evanston and New Haven and Bronxville and D.C. and Wellesley," she sighs. "I know we're not at the Vineyard because there's no water and I know this isn't Auckland because there are no kangaroos," she says. as if running through a checklist.

In the Bakers Square parking lot, Eileen pays the driver with the credit card with someone else's name on it.

Inside, after we've ordered coffee and meatloaf and a chicken potpie, I ask about it.

"It's my editor's," she says. She claps her hands. "I'm surprised you'd notice that."

"I was just... well, you know--" I stammer.

"It's funny," she says, pushing her coffee away. "I'm famous by name only -- hardly anybody recognizes my face -- with a scarf and Prada sunglasses I could be anybody -- but my name. That's when I get into trouble.

"How?"

"Well," she starts. "It's not like I get ambushed or anything. But people want autographs, interviews, advice on their dissertations, what have you. It gets tedious."

"I can imagine."

"But most of the time, they just want to--" she leans towards me and whispers, "talk."

"What's wrong with that?"

"I guess nothing," she says, "like in theory."

"Where do you go from here?"

"On the tour? Well, in nine cities, I'll get to sleep in my apartment for two nights."

"How long does this go on for?"

"Another month. Then I'm doing a workshop at the Sorbonne and then some MTV thing. Me and some of the Real World alumni. Heather B is slated to host."

I look at the plate in front of me. I drag a fork through mashed potatoes listlessly and impale a couple of snap peas.

"What are you thinking?" she asks.

I put down the fork. "July" is all I say.

"Yeah," she says, drawing the word out. "And?"

"My birthday is in July."

"That's great-- I mean, I, well, you know."

"I really don't like them, birthdays." I pause to gulp water from my glass. "I mean I don't have a problem with other people's, it's just--"

"You missed my birthday," she says, tilting her head up, pouting her eyes and mouth.

"When? I ask, genuinely concerned.

"March," she says. "I was twenty-six on the twenty-sixth." She laughs quickly. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"It means you're an Aries?"

"You know I don't subscribe to that school of thought," she says. "You goof."

"So, Paris," I say.

"Yeah," she says. "That's the only thing I'm looking forward to. I want to live in Paris--"

"Quel arrondisement?" I tease.

She laughs hysterically. "I haven't really thought about it," she manages to eke out, clutching herself.

"You know, I've never been," I say, sadly. "To France, to Europe."

"Why haven't you? Not even when you were growing up?"

"My parents were emotionally challenged? Socially inept? Xenophobic? I don't know why."

"So go," she says. "Do something about it."

"When?"

"Now. Tonight."

"You're crazy."

A busboy clears our plates. Then, a different waitress approaches our table. She's young, maybe twenty, and wears a purple tank top. She lifts a hand to her head, touching brown and black hair that's pulled back, matted thickly because of how hot it is in the restaurant. A silver necklace with an ankh hanging from it dangles before her when she leans in, balancing herself against the edge of the table. Muscular thighs. A chill runs through me. Tight, brown shoulders.

"I like your shoes," she says to me, pointing at my Docs.

"I like your tattoo," I say.

"Oh, that," she says, shifting her weight from foot to foot self-consciously. "It's a panda. Thanks."

I lift up my glass. "Can we have some more water?"

"You can have mine," Eileen says quickly.

The waitress looks at Eileen, and then back at me.

"We're fine," I tell her.

Later, we order pie. Eileen chooses apple; I ask for peach.

"Why do you keep smelling your hands?" I ask Eileen. She looks tense and rubs her eyes periodically.

"Oh, it's nothing," she sighs. "I'm just having a blue flash."

"Really?" I ask, excited. "Tell me more."

"It's hard to describe," she says, then quickly adding, "right now, it feels like it may be turning green, like parsley."

"Are you okay? Do you want me to get the check?" I grow anxious, concerned. "Parsley?"

She reaches into her purse, digs around, and comes back with a small pill case and several pens. She takes a yellow pill out of the case and puts it in her mouth, swallowing it down with water.

"Ask for some more napkins," she urges.

I ask the waitress with the tattoo if she could bring us some. She comes back with only one, and it's tiny, barely large enough for a cocktail. Eileen looks at me worriedly and I tell the waitress, "I need more. Like two or three. Is that okay?"

She rolls her eyes and sighs as she walks away. She returns with exactly two more and continues to look entirely harried from the request, from having to deal with Eileen and me for so long, being so importunate and recklessly needy.

"Okay," Eileen says, after the waitress shuffles away. She hands me one of the pens. "I want you to do something--"

"What?"

"Write something you're thinking." She pauses, awaiting my reaction. When I don't laugh or throw my hands in the air, she continues. "I'll tell you when to stop."

"Okay," I say, checking other tables to see if anyone watches. We start. She immediately delves into hers, trying to hold the edges of the napkin flatly enough so that the pen doesn't break through. I think about this briefly before starting. In a couple of moments, she says, "Okay, done?" capping her pen.

"Done," I say.

"Read yours," she implores.

I lift the napkin up and clear my throat dramatically. "'He didn't have a place to go,'" I start, squinting. "'He had been living in her apartment; he moved in during that spring, and things were still going on.'" I look up at her.

"Good," she says. "Here's mine: 'This summer I want to eat a very large salad. Then I want a glass of Bordeaux, and then I want to go home.'"

"Interesting."

"I just wanted to hear something you didn't say." She takes both napkins and folds them up, dropping all the materials back into her purse.

"What are you thinking but not saying?" I ask.

She doesn't answer until we're heading back to the hotel, down Western Avenue in a different taxi. She says, "Let's leave. Let's go to Wisconsin."

"Wisconsin?" I ask, playfully. "Why there?"

She looks at me seriously, unyielding.

"I'm reading there tomorrow night. In Madison."

"And you want me to come?"

"Yes."

I lean back, hard against the vinyl car seat. "I don't know how we would, I mean-- buses stop running, trains--"

"Your car. You'll drive."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I don't have a car."

"We'll rent one."

"I don't drive."

"What?"

"I don't--"

"Why?"

"I'm afraid to."

"Why?"

"I just am," I stammer. "I have been for some time now."

"Why is that? Did something happen?"

"No, nothing happened."

"Well, why then?"

"I just don't want to get hurt, I guess. I'm scared."

She takes my hand, wrapping hers around it. Her palm feels warm. We're following behind a semi truck. The taxi driver follows the truck too closely and doesn't brake when the truck does, he just keeps charging towards it, barreling down Western, like he's daring it. Eileen is kind of entranced by this scene -- watching the driver's crazed, maniacal eyes that want to scream out Yeah, Yeah with this bizarre intensity and she takes her cell phone out ("voice mail," she explains) but doesn't take her eyes off the driver or the truck in front and I wonder why the driver doesn't just pull into the other lane in which no cars travel.

First and last movements.

A Mendelssohn trio drifts into the room through the clock radio on the nightstand. Eileen orders a bottle of an expensive wine from room service. I lie back on the bed.

"This was all I could find," I say, after she hangs up the phone, pointing at the radio. The music is interspersed with unwieldy gusts of static.

"Oh," she says. "That's okay." She takes off her sweater and folds it. The shirt she's left wearing has no sleeves. She sits in the armchair across from the bed.

I close my eyes, listening to the music. So soft, so serene. When I concentrate hard enough, the static noises disappear.

"Come with me, Robert," she says. I feel her voice drawing closer to me, yet softer, almost an undulating whisper, a tide. "I want you to."

"What if I said yes," I ask slowly, dreamily. "Where would we go?"

She climbs on the bed and lies on her stomach beside me. I open my eyes and look at her. She kicks off her shoes and they fall onto the floor behind her with two quick thuds.

"Anywhere," she says.

"What would I tell Jean?"

"Nothing," she says, and then adding, "you could say you wanted to take the bus somewhere and draw."

"She wouldn't believe it -- she thinks I'm way too indolent. She doesn't even have me grocery shop."

"It's not entirely unlikely," she offers. She runs a finger down the length of buttons on my shirt. "It's entirely feasible."

"What if we start," I say.

"Start what?"

"What if we start and it keeps going and it gets beyond us and it's still going and then what do we do?" My eyelids loom heavily and I close them, quickly growing unable to compete with their insistence.

"It never does," she murmurs, her lips touching the side of my ear. "You don't have to worry about that -- It will never be beyond us--"

"What if we can't breathe? What if it fills our lungs like a fluid and eventually consumes us?"

"What if it doesn't?"

I might say, "Maybe it already has and we just don't know?" but I can't tell for sure. The music on the radio rises to a crescendo -- a pinnacle it's never reached. A place higher than I've ever heard it-- higher than, perhaps, anybody has. Then it drops. A knock at the door.

When I wake up, the room is completely dark. I'm disoriented, can't place myself in the context until I turn on the lamp above, on the little wooden night table. She's gone. I'm still wearing my clothes, my shirt, my jeans, my shoes. The clock radio display informs me that it's afternoon. She's gone. No luggage on the stand, no sound of running water in the bathroom.

I call Jean from the payphone downstairs.

She asks me where I am.

"I'm so sorry," I blubber into the phone. The tears flow steadily even though I'm shaking.

She says I should come home.

I wipe my nose with a wrinkled sleeve. An elderly couple passes me on their way into the restaurant and they look at me tenderly. Outside, the sun is staggering.

A month or two later, I walk around the apartment idly, eating a banana Popsicle. I haven't been to the Barnes and Noble since Eileen's reading. I've been sort of busy collaborating on a design project with Mark Stafford, a friend from RISD who recently began teaching at the Art Institute and wants me to take some classes there, some stuff in visual electronic media, something called The Rigors of Urban Design. I've taken the bus downtown several times but mostly I'm able to work at home and I can spread out plans and drawings on the floor in the living room. Some afternoons, I sit under the skylight on the third floor of the library. Jean is in Akron for the week, camping out in her brother David's back bedroom so she can spend some time with Kevin, who has, as Jean reports cheerfully, been reacting to the new treatment "very responsively."

I take the mail in after lunch. Interposed between bills and catalogs is a postcard and I almost pass over it. It's a long scene -- a panoramic shot of a breakfast table on a wooden veranda, two empty deck chairs, fruit and croissants, a bowl and strawberries. Tiny paper caps cover glasses of cranberry and orange juice. Plants and pink and white and red flowers. Clouds provide a beatific backdrop for the majestic, pointed edifice beyond. It's from the Marignan-Elysees:

le 6 juillet 97

Dear Robert,

This postcard is a picture of our terrace off of our room -- It's wonderful seeing the Eiffel Tower when we wake up & go to sleep. If you think the paper napkin situation was bad in Evanston, you should see Spain -- they're wax coated so that you get NO absorbency. Vive la France.

Love, Eileen.

I flip the card over and stare at the scene closely -- how beautiful it really is -- a perfect rendering of such an inviting day. I can almost feel the warmth begin to permeate in the room -- it's a brilliant July sun at its zenith -- outside it's even more wonderful than just looking at it -- golden and yellow and fiery when I go to meet it. I start walking.