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27
Nina sealedthe box on the last of Morris LeGrange’s photos, taped it shut, and looked around with a sigh. It had taken her the better of part of the day to get everything sorted and packed. She was always a little sad to see the photos go, but she was glad they went to people who appreciatedthem.
In spite of Nina’s mistake with the caterer, Morris’s show had been a success. She’d come clean with Moni, promising to pay for the mistake out of pocket, but Moni had laughed away theidea.
“Girl, if you think this is the first time we’ve made an expensive mistake, you’d be wrong. It’s just part of doing business. You solved the problem. Don’t worry about it. Besides, I could use the write-off.”
Tracy had delivered on the vegetarian menu and no one had been the wiser. It would have been easy to discount Moni’s generosity as a playing of the friend card after Nina told her about breaking up with Jack — although not the details — but Nina knew Moni by now: she would have forgiven the mistakeanyway.
Nina had felt like she was sleepwalking as she moved through the show, talking to buyers, keeping Morris’s wine glass full, picking up empties left behind by gallery visitors who hadn’t known what to do withthem.
Jack’s face as she’d left his apartment was emblazoned on her memory: the pain in his eyes had been as real as the pleasure he’d shown her, as real as the tenderness he’d shown her after they made love, as real as the love he’d confessed to her inCroatia.
That’s what Jack didn’t understand: it was allreal.
The pain, the pleasure, the confusion, the absurdity, even theboredom.
But you had to let it in to make it real, and since she’d left Jack, Nina had let it in inspades.
She didn’t try to explain away her feelings as some kind of sexual addiction, although she still wanted him with a fever that sometimes took her breath away. She sat with it instead, let herself feel the pain when it hit her, the sorrow, even the cravings of her body. She let it all roll through her, let the tears come when they wanted tocome.
She still hadn’t been able to connect with Judith — the other woman must be out of town, maybe at the apartment in Paris mentioned in the article Nina had read — but Nina tried to take a page out of her book by accepting it all withoutjudgement.
She’d given only the barest of details to Karen — that she’d started to feel sick being with Jack, that she didn’t think it was a healthy relationship. She’d even been guilty of using a phrase she once would have made fun of: the relationship didn’t serve heranymore.
She’d almost cringed when she said it, then realized it was true. She’d been thinking about the phrase ever since, about the fact that it was up to her to choose the experiences that served her, about the fact that it was okay to walk away from ones thatdidn’t.
She couldn’t be responsible for Jack’s pain, his loneliness. It wasn’t her job to fix him, any more than it was his job to fixher.
And really, neither of them needed to be fixedanyway.
She got to her feet and stacked the boxes against the wall. She needed to call FedEx and schedule delivery, but she was suddenly starving. She would do it from the apartment while she waited for a large pizza from Gino’s. Maybe wingstoo.
It had taken her a few days to regain her appetite, but after that it had returned with a vengeance. She felt like someone who’d been on rations for the past six months, and she ate with a fervor that made Karen stare at her inawe.
Nina’s clothes were fitting properly for the first time in weeks — not the designer garments Jack had bought her, she’d left all of those at his apartment, but her own clothes, the ones she’d painstakingly chosen from sales at Bergdorf and Bloomingdale’s, the ones she’d thought hard about before plunking down her creditcard.
She was starting to feel like herself again, starting to recognize the face staring back at her from the mirror and the thoughts that wound their way through her mind like old friends, no longer a slave to memories of being in bed with Jack, about what he’d done to her last, about what he’d do to her nexttime.
The bell over the door chimed and she looked up in surprise. She’d been about to close, and they rarely got walk-in traffic on aweeknight.
A messenger in bike shorts and a helmet came toward her with a large manila envelope and a smallpackage.
“You NinaFontaine?”
She smiled. Yes. Yes, shewas.
“That’sme.”
“Got a delivery,” he said, pulling a clipboard out of hisbackpack.
“Forme?”
He nodded and handed her the clipboard. She signed her name, gave it back to him, and took the package he handedher.
A glance at the return address did nothing to ease her curiosity:Stevens, Chase, and Goldstein, Attorneys atLaw.
“Have a good one,” the messengersaid.
