Circles of Confusion (10 page)

The home office for Kissling Insurance, Inc., was located on the twenty-ninth floor of a downtown office building known locally as "Big Pink" for its pale copper-colored metal exterior. Patiently, Claire stood waiting in front of the firm's receptionist as she spoke into her telephone headset. She seemed in no particular hurry to finish her conversation. A flock of iridescent-winged starlings flew by the floor-to-ceiling windows. Surrounded by acres of polished dark wood gleaming under recessed lights, Claire felt out of place and unsophisticated. If this was how she felt standing in a Portland insurance firm, then what was she doing going to New York?

The receptionist laughed throatily into the tiny black mike of her headset. "Thank you again.... May I help you?"

Without the visual clue of a receiver being put down, it took a second for Claire to realize that this last sentence had been addressed to her.

"I'm here to see Evan Elliott."

"Do you have an appointment with Mr. Elliott, Ms . . . ?" The receptionist arched an eyebrow, clearly not remembering her, even though Claire had been here half a dozen times before to meet Evan for lunch.

"It's Claire Montrose. And no, I don't really have an appointment."

"Then I'll see if he is available. Please have a seat."

She indicated a low-slung leather and chrome armchair. Claire sank into it, her knees higher than her head. The receptionist began a low-voiced conversation, presumably with Evan. From a distance the headset was invisible, giving the impression that she was talking to herself.

"Mr. Elliott will see you now." Continuing her pretense of never having seen Claire before, the receptionist came out from behind her desk to point the way. Claire struggled up from her chair. She was used to being taller than most women. Now she had the slightly disconcerting sensation of being at eye level with the receptionist's red-painted lips, thanks to the woman's four-inch strappy heels.

They were the kind of shoes she and Lori called "fuck-me shoes" if they were in a catty mood.

Claire tapped lightly on Evan's door and then opened it. "Hi, Evan."

Evan looked up from his desk, a frown drawing his brows together. In front of him was a single stack of papers, lined up so neatly that they almost looked bound. "What are you doing here, Claire?"

"I thought I would take you to lunch."

"Lunch? But I brought my lunch." He really looked at her for the first time since she had entered his office. "Since when do you wear jeans to work?"

"I took the day off. In fact"—she took a deep breath—"I took the week off."

"Why?" He looked more put upon than curious.

"Since we got home from my aunt's, I've been showing the painting to people—first to Charlie and then to the guy who owns Eclectica, you know, that shop in Multnomah Village? They both said it was very old, maybe several centuries, and maybe even valuable."

"Right. I'm sure there are a lot of great works of art sitting around under beds in trailer homes across America." For the first time, Claire noticed that the bookshelves behind Evan were dotted with blue stickers from a label maker. She squinted. Under his set of phone books it said "Phone Books."

"They both said the only way to know for sure is to have an expert look at it. So"—she took a deep breath—"I've decided to go to New York for a couple of days. I'm going to get it appraised at Christie's or Avery's or Sotheby's." She found some renewed courage in the way the word Sotheby's rolled off her tongue. It sounded rich and exclusive and refined and British.

Evan sat back in his chair and steepled his hands. "You're going to go off on some wild-goose chase, based on nothing more than the opinions of your hundred-and-three-year-old roommate and some guy who runs a junk shop? No, I don't think so."

"What do you mean, you don't think so?" Claire echoed incredulously.

"You're not going to go, that's what I mean." Evan picked up his pen as if it were all settled.

"Are you saying that because of the plane trip? You're worried about it crashing?"

"Of course it's not because of the plane. Statistically, you have an eighty-five percent greater chance of dying in an automobile than an airplane. And that doesn't even factor in for that car of yours." He waved his free hand disparagingly. "No, you're not going because it's a waste—of time, of energy and of money. You're a smart woman, even if you never went to college, so if you think about it even a little I'm sure you'll agree with me."

A wave of heat swept through Claire. Clearly considering the matter settled, Evan wasn't even looking at her anymore. In his tiny, precise handwriting, he made a note in the margin of his paperwork.

She took a soundless step backward on the plush carpet, then another, until her hand was on the doorknob.

"Evan?"

"Hm?" he said, his eyes still on his paperwork.

"I am going."

She closed the door on his surprised face. A minute later, Claire found herself shaking behind the wheel of her car.

CC DDAY

Stumbling a little from exhaustion, her bag banging against her hip with every step, Claire emerged from the tube that connected the airplane to the airport. LaGuardia was a huge, ill-lit cavern. Balled- up food wrappers littered the ground around overflowing trash bins. People leaned against No Smoking signs, cigarettes in their hands.

On the plane, she had sat next to a woman in her mid-forties who wore her hair in two short blond pigtails, like an aging Olga Korbut. The woman had commandeered the armrest, so that Claire felt boxed in, her knees brushing the seat ahead of her.

As lunch was being served, Claire's seatmate made an announcement. "I've written a book and now I'm going to New York to sell it." They were somewhere over what the pilot said were the Rocky Mountains but what was really only a sea of clouds.

Claire felt a flash of mingled respect and envy. "What's it called?"

"Freddie the Frog's Spiritual Journey."

She imagined a green grinning cartoon frog sitting on a lily pad. "So it's a children's book?" She took a bite of her stale turkey sandwich. From the front of the plane came the tink of silver on china.

The woman reared back, affronted. "No." She made a little puh sound at the stupidness of Claire's question and turned pointedly away to stare out at the clouds.

Later the woman had thawed toward Claire enough to begin chattering on about a recent plane crash in Indiana that had turned every passenger into flesh fragments strewn over a cornfield. "Did you hear about those two hands they found clutching each other? fust the hands?" she asked Claire, oblivious to the angry looks of the other passengers.

Now Claire stood with one foot resting on her suitcase, a safety tip passed along by Charlie, and tried to get her bearings. People streamed around her, as busy and self-possessed as ants. She felt self consciously tall and pale amid the sea of dark heads that bobbed past her.

Overhead, arrows and signs directed her to limousines, baggage claim areas, rest rooms, food courts, newspaper stands and taxis. This last caught her eye. She'd never been in a taxi and had planned to find a bus to take her into Manhattan. But when in Rome...

Outside, Claire took a deep breath, her first official lungful of New York air. It smelled of exhaust with a faint note of disinfectant. Even though it was ten o'clock at night, the sky glowed as if the sun were just about to rise. A long line of yellow taxis snaked its way to the taxi stand, where a matching line of travelers stood waiting. A man with a walkie-talkie waved the first person in line into the first taxi, and the line shuffled forward. That seemed easy enough. Claire joined the end of the line, and tried to affect a posture of boredom. She was relieved to note that her jeans and sweater did not seem terribly out of place.

The man ahead of her turned around and gave her a smile that exposed the jumbled yellow teeth of someone who'd grown up poor. "Want to share a taxi into midtown?"

Claire shook her head without saying anything. The man shrugged and turned away Charlie had recommended the Farthingale, describing it as being in the theater district. Claire wasn't sure if that was in midtown or not, and she didn't want to betray her ignorance.

When her turn came she opened the taxi's front door and sat down beside the driver. The driver, a burly man with a beard, gave a grunt of surprise as she sat her bag on top of her feet. Too late, Claire realized her mistake. You were supposed to ride behind the driver, not beside him. Eight hours on a plane had left her muddled.

"Could you take me to the Farthingale Hotel? It's on Forty-fifth between Fifth and Sixth?"

He had already shot out into traffic. "Sure, sure, no problem." His English was heavily accented. The ID card pinned to the sunflap on the passenger side drew her eye. In it, his square, weather-beaten face was without the mustache he now sported.

"Yuri Andropov? Are you from the Soviet Union?"

"No Soviet Union anymore. From Ukraine. See. Ukraine is here." He batted at the air directly above the steering wheel, then moved his hand so that it was over the crackling, squawking radio. "Russia is to the east, here. And Poland to the west. Here." Now both hands were off the wheel. He appeared to be steering solely with his knees. Claire shrank back into her seat. Cars on all sides of them cut back and forth, inches away, without benefit of turn signals, or even, as far as she could tell, a single glance in any mirror. Lanes met, snarled, spun off. Yuri finally dropped his hands to the wheel and Claire could breath again. "Ukraine was rich. Bread basket for Soviet Union."

"Why did you come to America?"

"Independence from Russia was 1991 year. First, we were happy. But things don't change, really. Communists, socialists, they are there still. To open even bank account is bribe after bribe. I work in mines. In six months, I was not paid. So I come here." He turned to look at her, again neglecting the traffic. "Where you live, huh?"

"I'm from Portland, Oregon."

Yuri gave her a blank look as the taxi narrowly missed a black limousine with tinted windows sliding into the lane ahead of them.

"It's above California. On the other coast." Claire found herself imitating him, patting the air above the plastic dash that shone as if it had been polished. "I'm just here to visit."

"You have boyfriend?"

"Not really." Too late, Claire understood Yuri might have an interest in the answer, had read something into her accidentally slipping into the seat beside him.

"I am forty-four years old. Good man. I am in health training, yes?"

"Health training?" Claire echoed.

"I have renounced from meat products utterly. My hand don't touch the sugar basin and salt cellar. I lift the dumbbells on the biceps." He lifted his hands from the steering wheel again, grasped them and shook them above his head like a wining boxer. The taxi began to drift to the side. At the last possible second he dropped his hands to the wheel again. "I engage in jogging also. It is known that jogging is coaching the lungs, heart and vessels excellently. Muscles on my legs tight as the rope. "

Claire patted her bag, on more familiar ground. "I run. I even brought my running shoes for this trip."

"See? We are alike each other. My handshake isn't flabby; my smile isn't guilty. I am good man." Yuri grabbed her hand and placed it on his abdomen. "Stomach muscles strong as oak's board. I am calm, restrained and indulgent to the people's weaknesses. We go to West Virginia tonight and get married, okay?"

"What are you talking about?" Claire tried to pull her hand away, but he gripped it tighter.

"Feel," he said, raising her hand higher. "Feel how my heart intensely beat. I am now falling in the precipice. The question is about the precipice of love."

Claire wrenched her hand away. "There is no question. I am not in love with you." She was relieved when he slowly put both hands back on the wheel.

"No West Virginia?" Yuri's tone was more wistful now, and his eyes were back on the road and not on her. She was relieved to see that they still seemed to be driving into the city.

"No. The Farthingale."

"Too bad." He sighed. "Thus we must decide to turn up from the precipice."

"Yes, we must," Claire agreed.

OL4LUV

Even at eleven at night, the circular lobby of the Farthingale was crowded with travelers who wheeled, dragged and kicked suitcases back and forth, the sounds echoing under the high ceiling. A babble of languages washed over Claire as she took her place in yet another line. But the clerk at the front desk, while cheerfully agreeing that she had a reservation, told her that there wasn't a single room left in the hotel.

"But I reserved it on my credit card!"

"Don't worry, ma'am, we've taken the hold off your card. And you can come back tomorrow. It's only tonight that we're overbooked. We've already made arrangements for you at the Hotel Ford. It's just two blocks from here—right across from the New York Times building."

Claire shouldered her bag again. What had once seemed an admirably restrained number of items now weighed as much as a bag of cement. She pushed open the brass-bound glass door and walked out into the night. Alert for any sign of danger, she found the street deserted. She walked a block in the wrong direction, past shuttered delis and camera stores with metal pulldown blinds, before finally realizing she must turn back.