As long as his days pass in order, he tells himself, as long as nothing changes, he’ll be okay. He thinks.
When Wings arrives she does what she does so amazingly that he’s never quite certain what happened, only that it leaves him joyful and exhausted; then she leaves. His nights are marvels, uncomplicated by the pressure of the usual lover’s expectations, because they both know she will be gone before the sun comes up. She always is. He wakes up alone, to coffee and the morning paper, sunlight on mahogany. Their nights are wild and confusing, but in the daytime world that Weston has spent his life perfecting, everything is reassuringly the same.
Or so he tells himself. It’s what he has to believe. If he saw any of this for what it is, he’d have to act, and the last thing Weston wants right now is for his dizzy collisions in the night to end.
Until today, when he hurtles out of sleep at 4:00 A.M. Panic wakes him, the roar of blood thundering in his ears. His synapses clash in serial car crashes; the carnage is terrible. He slides out of bed in the gray dawn and bolts downstairs, lunging from room to room, shattered by the certain knowledge that something has changed.
Unless everything has changed.
What, he wonders, running a finger over tabletops, the rims of picture frames, the outlines of priceless maquettes by famous sculptors, all still in place, reassuringly there. What?
Dear God, his Picasso plates are missing. Treasures picked up off the master’s studio floor by Great-grandfather Weston, who walked away with six signed plates under his arm, leaving behind a thousand dollars and the memory of his famous smile. Horrified, he turns on the light. Pale circles mark the silk wallpaper where the plates hung; empty brackets sag, reproaching him.
He doesn’t mention this to Wings when she comes to him that night; he only breathes into her crackling hair and holds her closer, thinking, It can’t be her. She couldn’t have, it couldn’t be Wings.
Then he buries himself in her because he knows it is.
Before dawn she leaves Weston drowsing in his messy bed, dazed and grateful. His nights continue to pass like dreams; the rich orphan so bent on life without intrusions welcomes the wild girl in spite of certain losses; love hurts, but he wants what he wants. Their time together passes without reference to the fact that when Weston comes down tomorrow his King George silver service will be missing, to be followed by his Kang dynasty netsuke, and then his best Miró. I love her too much, he tells himself as objects disappear daily. I don’t want this to stop.
He inspects. All his external systems remain in place. Alarms are set; there’s no sign of forcible entry or exit. It is as though things he thought he prized more than any woman have dropped into the earth without explanation.
He can live without these things, he tells himself. He can! Love is love, and these are only objects.
Until the Brancusi marble goes missing.
In a spasm of grief, his heart empties out.
Wings won’t know when they make love that night that her new man is only going through the motions—unless she does know, which straightforward Weston is too new at deception to guess. He does the girl with one eye on the door, which is how he assumes she exits once she’s pushed him off the deep end into sleep—which she has done nightly, vanishing before he wakes up.
Careful, Wings. Tonight will be different.
To him, Wings is a closed book.
He needs to crack her open like a pi?ata and watch the secrets fall out.
Guilty and terrible as he feels about doubting her, confused because he can’t bear to lose one more thing, he can’t let this go on. With Wings still in his arms he struggles to stay awake, watching through slitted eyes for what seems like forever. She drowses; he waits. The night passes like a dark thought, sullenly dragging its feet. Waiting is terrible. By the time a crack of gray light outlines his bedroom blackout shades, he’s about to die of it. The girl he loves sighs and delicately disengages herself. Grieving, he watches through slitted eyes, and when she goes, he counts to twenty and follows.
He knows the house better than Wings; she’ll take the back stairs, so he hurries down the front. When she sneaks into the central hall and silences the alarm so she can escape with another of his treasures, he’ll spring. Sliding into the niche behind the Brancusi’s empty pedestal, he crouches until his joints crack, echoing in the silent house. He has no idea how she escaped.
Damn fool, he thinks, and does not know which of them he’s mad at, himself or elusive Wings Germaine.
When they lie down together after midnight, Weston’s fears have eased: of being caught following—the tears of regret, the recriminations—unless his greatest fear was that she wasn’t coming back because she knew.
Did she know he followed? Does she?
She slides into his arms in the nightly miracle that he has come to expect, and he pulls her close with a sigh. What will he do after he ends this? What will she steal from him tonight, and what will she do when he confronts her? He doesn’t know, but it’s long overdue. When she slips out of bed before first light, he gives her time to take the back stairs and then follows. Like a shadow, he drifts through darkened rooms where the girl moves so surely that he knows she must linger here every night, having her way with his treasured things.
With the swift, smooth touch of a child molester, she strokes his family of objects but takes nothing.
Damn! Is he waiting for her to steal? What is she waiting for? Why doesn’t she grab something so he can pounce and finish this?
Empty-handed, she veers toward the darkened kitchen.
Weston’s back hairs rise and tremble as Wings opens the door to the smoky stone cellar and starts down.
His heart sags. Is that all she is? A generic homeless person with a sordid squat in a corner of his dank basement? When Wings Germaine comes to his bed at night she is freshly scrubbed; she smells of wood smoke and rich earth, and in the part of his head where fantasies have moved in and set up housekeeping, Weston wants to believe that she’s fresh from her own rooftop terrace or just in from a day on her country estate.
Idiot.
He has two choices here. He can go back to bed and pretend what he must in order to keep things as they are in spite of escalating losses—or he can track her to her lair.
But, oh! The missing furniture of his life, the art. His Brancusi! What happened to them? Has she sneaked his best things out of the house and fenced them, or does she keep them stashed in some secret corner of his cellar for reasons she will never explain? Is his treasured Miró safe? Is anything? He has to know.
Oh, lover. It is a cry from the heart. Forgive me.