John clattered down the granite stairs and out onto Harlow Street, hanging a quick left. Immediately before him was a tall woman he was going to crash into. John could just barely push a foot to try to miss her, but he had a head of speed.
He only brushed her shoulder and hip, but the course change set him at high velocity directly at a city litter basket. He watched the contact approach, the light pole, the iron bracket, sickeningly aware that it would hurt and that it was inevitable. It is moments like these which life is lived in a manner to avoid.
A slim arm hooked his waist and he was slowed enough to meet the basket with his feet, not his face and body. The woman supported him to regain his balance, so that he came to rest on the sidewalk, amazed to be whole.
"Slow down, there," she said, "you'll get hurt!" Her face was stretched by a friendly grin. John was tripping all over himself thanking her, and he already looked pretty ridiculous even before he began.
Once that was over, he had decided that being civil to his good looking rescuer was more important than getting back quickly. So he accompanied her and they introduced themselves to one another for a couple of blocks. She reached her destination, an office building with a gallery on the first floor, locked up.
She fished keys from her bag and asked if she could meet him for lunch at the Bagel Shop.
"Any time in the next week. I have to work now, but we aren't done talking."
I go to school
was on his lips, but he sensed something.
"Tomorrow's good. What time?"
So he had to plan to skip school to make a twelve-thirty lunch date with a classy gallery girl with a fast and accurate arm on her. She seemed happy about it and took her leave into the gallery, and John floated off down Central Street.
"What just happened, anyway, John, you idiot. She's fuckin thirty or something, I don't understand." John talked to himself when the going got weird, it seemed to help. It didn't resolve any mysteries for him this time. But he was going to skip and be there anyway.
He liked her amused eyes and the way she moved, so muscular yet so feminine. And he was sure there was some kind of attraction he was exerting on her. She did want to see him again, it wasn't a rhetorical thing.
The scene haunted him until late in the night.
The Bagel Shop smelled as good as ever, of lentil soup, lox, bagels and eggs. He got in line but didn't see Gina. He was ordering a bagel when a set of tits were laid across his shoulders. He had to interrupt an impulse to turn, because to do so would have thrust his face into them. Gina stroked fingers lightly over John's ear and neck, saying, "Sorry I'm late! Forgive me!"
She disengaged from him and requested the line's indulgence, she was late, they were together. She offered to pick up the whole tab and ordered her soup and egg salad. He followed at the elbow of his effusive tall companion and took a seat with her in a booth.
The shop always steamed up its windows, but the intention of the booth had been to allow people to watch the street. So the booth was a well lit space and the window a vast array of little M. C. Eschers of cars and pedestrians curved to fit in ten thousand colored beads of water. Gina smelled a little too floral but she was so obviously charmed to be with him that he settled in next to her as she indicated he should.
"You look nice, Gina," he told her. She had a '40's style skirt and waspwaisted jacket in a medium gray serge with a little toque bearing a spray of veil. Silver and pearl accents, a pin, a silk scarf set in the cleavage.
"I had a date! Listen, you had to skip school to be here, didn't you? I thought maybe. You should come see the gallery, we're going great guns. We'll be ready to open in less than a month. You can stay off the street in case your mother's friends drive by and wonder if you shouldn't be in school. Okay? Right after lunch, it'll be a good break for me to show you what I've got. Good!" She squeezed his thigh and gave it a pat to seal the deal.
Their food came and was duly dealt with. She got him to tell about himself, who his girlfriend was, what went on in his school and his life, and she in her turn told a story about a big controversial exhibit with naked mannequin sculptures, assemblages addressing sex role issues. This developed into a conversation about their attitudes toward sex and nudity.
At the gallery she locked the street door behind them without discussion of it; evidently it was just locked all the time until the place had its grand opening. "The workmen are gone to lunch so we won't be bothering them." The place was half-lit and echoing and smelled of sawdust and carpet. The gallery lighting systems were something John had never considered, very versatile and very unobtrusive.
After the spaces still under construction, she led him through finished areas where artworks were stored. Gina pointed out an angel with absolutely torrid buns, oozing sexuality from the rear but pure and radiantly innocent from the front, a sculpture more than life size. John said "Nice bottom" in a noncommittal way, and Gina chuckled.
"That's what I said! When I caught you--" she quelled his interruption-- "I saw your nice little buns, and said the same thing!"
John focused on the fact that he was locked in alone with her and no one knew where he was at all. A lot of the joy leaked right out of the encounter with this reflection.
Gina saw he'd suddenly frozen. "I'm being terrible, I'm sorry, please just forget that, I don't know what made me say something like that." She bobbed her head lower to try and catch his eye, smiling.
"It's not so terrible to be told you have nice buns! Don't worry about it," John said, but his disquiet persisted. He told himself, though, that he was only here because he felt the same way. "I kinda fell for you at the same time, anyway."
"You did? I wondered, but you really came to lunch, even from school, it made me feel warm and appreciated, you know?"
"Mm."
"Look, I have another thing or two I want you to get a good look at, just a second..." Gina put her bag on a couple of low crates, and fished in it. Bending forward she gave John a really good look at a couple of things down the front of the double-breasted jacket. Very firm and luscious looking in the half light.
She came up with a key on a red tag. "It's downstairs, see if you can guess what it's for. We found it here when we moved in, after we had the lock drilled out and replaced."
She clicked off in her heels and led him past artworks to a corner stairwell and down. The utilitarian corridor down there had a fire door in it, which the key let them through. The room behind it was windowless and pitch dark until she flipped breakers in a panel.
It turned out to be two rooms, a small anteroom and a large room beyond. The room beyond had a bed, a couch, a couple of sturdy hardback chairs, various different rugs and bed furnishings, lamps, dead plants in floor pots and in hanging ones, and some lumber. On the lumber were mysterious devices of cloth and metal which were broken umbrella-like structures of white and gold. A standing fan.
The furniture was arranged along two walls, and the lumber and the fan and the umbrella things scattered along the other two. John looked up and saw the large hooks and eyebolts protruding from the ceiling, which had been painted flat black. The anteroom had some tables and chairs and a rack for clothes.
"No idea," John said. "It looks like a set, the way only two walls are real."
"We believe someone used this to make porn movies. It's secret and there's only the bed and couch, and the bed there is screwed down to the floor. Then there's the hardware in the ceiling."
"Wow. It's pretty dusty. And the plants are dead."
"I don't know, there's never any sun here, the plants must have been just stuffed in here when they left, or I suppose they could have had grow lights."
