Page 77 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Nice friend.”

She bites into a canapé. “We pay him, of course.”

“I should hope so.”

“All right, well. I suppose I should introduce you around. Can’t keep you to myself forever.” We head toward a man and woman, standing by the glass walls at the far side of the living room, overlooking the lights of the city. All this glass, the drop below. Truly a different world, to pay so much for a sensation of precarity. “This is my friend Odette. I met her at Pickwick’s, and she disagreed with one of my rants so I knew I could trust her. Unlike Sylvie here, who just nods along to everything, so I never know what she’s thinking of me.”

The woman opens her mouth in shock. Sylvie, I suppose. She’s dressed in buttercup with a string of pearls at her throat. Elise pays her no attention. “Odette’s an artist and a very good one, undiscovered as of yet so no need to pretend you might know her work. This is Fred, Espen’s and my dearest friend from Stanford, and his wife, Sylvie, who I can’t help but pick on but only because she issolovely and young that it’s nearly impossible to be around her sometimes. Over there is Norman. Norman, here’s Odette, the artist I was telling you about.” He waves at me from across the room. “The Alastairs—Melinda and Harry—are always late but they’ll show eventually. For now, that’s it.”

“Your home is spectacular. Something out of a magazine.”

“Sunsetmagazine,” Fred says.

“Fred’s our archivist,” Elise says. I can’t tell if she’s joking, or if he is. But then she goes on. “Anyway, it was a disaster. We had to move half our stuff out so it wouldn’t look too crowded, and then they didn’t even photograph all the rooms.”

“The story was gorgeous,” Fred says. “She’s just bitter.”

“Bitter?” I ask.

“We didn’t get the cover. ‘Arizona Vacations’ won out. We were relegated to pages thirty-two through thirty-eight.”

“A six-page story inSunsetmagazine doesn’t sound so bad,” I say.

“They even had a full-color spread,” Fred adds.

“That’s the thing. It’s humiliating to care so much about something so frivolous. Espen swears he’ll never step foot in Arizona out of spite. We’re vain people, Odette, there’s no getting around it.”

At the dinner table, over beef Stroganoff, Espen says, “I’m sorry your husband couldn’t make it. I’d like to meet him sometime.”

“He’d like that, too.” He really would. He loves beautiful things, beautiful people, and there’s less of a holding oneself together here than there is at my sisters’. Less effort of any kind. Theirs is a life spent doing whatever pleases them. I wonder what Felix would make of it. And then—reflexively, alarmingly—I wonder what Ginny would.

“What does your husband do?” Norman asks, and everyone’s eyes are on me.

“He’s a train porter,” I say.

Melinda’s eyes light up. “A train porter!” she says. “How romantic. I love trains. I’ve never met a train porter.”

“What on earth do you do with your luggage?” Elise asks.

“I mean, ineveryday life,” Melinda says. “Elise, you do give us all a hard time, don’t you.”

“I thought they were mostly colored men,” Harry says, lighting a cigarette.

My stomach clenches. “He is colored,” I say. “We both are. We’re Creole, from New Orleans.”

Silence, stretching a moment too long. Melinda leans closer to me, examining my face. “Fascinating,” she says. “I suppose I can see it.”

“Elise,” Espen says. “We should have invited Walter. I had drinks with him just the other day.”

“Walter is ourothercolored friend, so clearly you would have had much in common,” she says, winking at me.

“Please, I didn’t mean it likethat,” Espen says. “And it isn’t even true. There’s Timmy and Serge—”

“Yes, in Europe we know more colored people. The races are more divided here. But you know that, of course.”

The conversation swerves into politics and I’m grateful for the shift away from me. But as the night goes on, Sylvie sneaks little glances at me and I have an urge to take her by the hand, drag her into the light, and say, “Go ahead and stare until you’ve seen what you want to, and then leave me alone.”

Still, the night’s everything I hoped it would be. Sophisticated, adult, full of conversations about art. And thrumming under all of it is how Elise introduced me, how all of them see me as an artist. When I tell her it’s time for me to go, she says, “No, wait. I haven’t even shown you the back yet,” and leads me through the giant, heavy glass doors and down a set of stone steps and here’s a pool, black and glistening under the dark sky. “Now that you’ve been here, you’ll have to come back and swim soon.”