Category:

Austin feels the glass lifting from his fingers but keeps his eyes closed. Lee, what an incredible mother. She might want to talk more, though, and he can't. He's done for, slipping onto that floating platform on the shimmering lake between dream and sleep. Then he jerks awake, seeing Lee wandering away along the terrace wall, blowing out candles. Poof. Poof, then her white robe going ghostly against the boxwoods.

And here it comes at him. Ball of fire.

Just before he left New York to go south for the party, he dashed into his apartment. He had to pack in a hurry. His presentation had gone overtime. All good. Flying high. The project a GO. The scale model and specs only completed at two the night before, then a round of drinks with the team. Running on fumes but exalted. Sleep on the plane, all forty-five minutes? Dara, Dara. I will get to say my wife! The big boss from London was all smiles and congratulations except for two rather major "suggestions." Two hours till the flight out of LaGuardia for DC, where Dara surely has packed her yellow Mini with enough clothes for a week instead of this flying overnight trip. As carefully as he can, he rolled his suit and poked it into his duffel. Almost out the door, he sees the message light blinking.

"Austin, Shelley calling. Can you please ring me back asap? We should talk right away."

A wash of guilt traveled from his throat down to his shoes. He's told her. Told her. I'm long done. Those pointy pink lacquer nails of hers always seem about to dig into his flesh. "I'm a damned fool idiot," he said aloud. He slipped up in November when he traveled back to London to pitch his project.

He grabbed his bag. At university, she attracted him—someone so unfamiliar—those giant hoops swaying from her ears, sometimes even a bangle (worn ironically) around her ankle? Black waves of hair rippling down to her waist. Oh, she was mysterious and fresh, like nothing he'd ever seen before. Amit had known her in Delhi and vaguely thought there were complicated family stories, a mother who was an Irish nun or something. To Austin, she never said more than

"It's too baroque to unravel." Shelley, with that eyeliner, thick like on mummy lids. What is it? Kohl? Something fatalistic about her. Shelley, smart enough to get herself to Cambridge and to stand out among the intellectual English girls.

This nagging fear ever since that message. I should have grabbed my stuff and left the red light blinking.

Austin ran the film of when, since junior year and for six months before he took the job in New York, he and Shelley were sometime lovers. He'd definitively broken off contact but sometimes saw her at parties. A friendly wave, a how-are-you, that's all. A relief.

At Cambridge they'd had the same maths class, Austin suffering through the course and taking pass-fail to maintain his first-class honors goal. She sailed through, maths being instinctive to her. They ended up in an on/off relationship, on for her, mostly on/off for him. Pass. Fail. Her flowery scent and haunting inky eyes. Teakettle whistling in her bedsit, hanging lampshades made of pleated Indian fabric, strumming of sitar music in the background. "A bit of home," she explained, "for comfort. I need my props, although my mother would be shocked. Our house in Delhi is all flokati rugs, white sofas, and Eames chairs." A word she used often: need. That's what she projected. Dara, the opposite—her spiky independence and take-charge energy. Hard to pin Shelley down—clingy? Not exactly, but more that some voracious open space in her threatened him...Threatened what? He was glad for the work assignment in New York. A total break, finally.

In October 1994, a week after he arrived in New York, Austin met Dara. They were both staring at an incomprehensible construction at a Mary Boone Gallery opening. They looked at the contorted, deflated gray balloons glued to a manhole cover for a full minute, then at each other. They started laughing. Amid all the girls in black, she wore a red dress with big black buttons. She was slender; "trim" came to mind. Her skin, peachy with a few scattered freckles, her azure eyes like the clear waters of Greece on school break when he was in secondary school. Usually not prone to pick-up intros, he found himself turning to her. "Is this cool or not? I'm Austin. What's your name?" he'd asked. "Can I get you a plastic glass of something?"

"Well, I'm Dara Amelia Willcox. I'm from Hillston, North Carolina, a long way from where you're from, and yes. Then I wouldn't mind getting out of here asap." Whoa, who's picking up whom?

Those eyes, almost shocking, but mesmerizing. She might have been less stunning without that color, he thought (thin nose), but she was not without it; and obviously she was ballsy, cheeky, up for it, whatever "it" might mean. "Are you an artist? This kind of artist?" She waved her hand around the room of flocked garbage bags.

"Not at all, unfortunately. I rather like the sticky garbage bags." He told her about working at Calvert & Marlowe Architects, what luck to be picked by that firm. "Oh, not luck," she said, "they liked your confidence and your—what do you call it—your bespoke shoes."

"What about you?"