“Fair,” he said. “Will you do the same?”
She shrugged. “If you want.”
“What did you learn today?”
“That you don’t have very many friends.”
His smile broadened.
“And you?” she asked. “What did you learn about me?”
“That you’re so bored you’ll agree to six meaningless conversations with a stranger,” he said.
She smiled at him.
He smiled back at her.
“Thank you very much,” the waiter announced, handing Regan her card, and she looked down.
“What’s the tip?” she asked Aldo, maybe-testing him. “Since you’re some sort of math genius.”
“I always over-tip,” he said, reminding her, “My father owns a restaurant.”
She glanced up at him, considering it.
“Next time,” she said, “either neither of us eat, or we both do.”
“Noted,” he said. “And doubling the tax is probably sufficient.”
She did as he suggested and rose to her feet.
“Next time,” she offered, which he accepted with a nod.
“Next time,” he agreed, and then she walked out the door, adjusting her earrings before hiding a smile in the curve of her palm.
* * *
“I WAS WONDERING WHEN you were going to turn up again,” Regan said.
She had tucked her hair neatly behind one ear, angling herself towards him as he approached her. She had a way of doing that, Aldo thought; of inviting him into the geography of the conversation. He wondered how quickly in life she had learned that people wanted to be invited in.
“I had you pinned for either immediately or never,” she continued, “though your timing isn’t great.” She gestured to the meeting point behind her. “I have an Impressionism tour in five minutes.”
“Yes, I know,” Aldo said, holding up the museum’s pamphlet. “I’m signed up for that Impressionism tour.”
She blinked, half a laugh escaping against her will. She seemed to only laugh unexpectedly or not at all, from his observation. As far as Aldo could tell, any outward show of amusement by Charlotte Regan was either staged or a mutiny, no in between.
“Well, this counts as one of the six, then,” she told him. “You can’t go around wishing for more wishes.”
He shook his head. “It counts,” he agreed, “if we have a conversation. Otherwise it’s just me observing fine art.”
“It’s cheating is what it is,” Regan said. “You’re gaming the system.”
“If you consider your company a prize to be won, then yes,” he said. “But if it’s a hypothesis to be tested, then I’m just performing the necessary research.”
She frowned at him, looking suspicious. She seemed deeply suspicious of him in general, which he liked. He wasn’t often suspected of much that couldn’t be confirmed or rejected within the first five minutes of meeting him.
“What are you doing?” she asked him, and he shrugged.
“I want to see what you see,” he said. “How will I do that if I never observe you in your natural habitat?”
“This is a job,” Regan said, “not a habitat.”
“One you choose to do for free,” Aldo pointed out, and she opened her mouth.
“Excuse me,” interrupted someone on his left, “is this the area for the Impressionism tour?”
“Yes,” Regan and Aldo said in unison.
Regan gave him a silencing look.
“Yes,” she confirmed to the other person, a tourist with a Boston accent, and then she turned back to Aldo, arching a brow that seemed to indicate that he should behave himself. He shrugged in reply, innocent enough.
He’d told her the truth, after all. There was something very strange about her, and in order to ease his need to simplify a complex problem, he’d split her up into distinctive areas of study. The first of these was her relationship to art. She had once been both an artist and a criminal, according to her, and if he couldn’t observe her being one, then he would have to find a way to make sense of the other.
Mostly, Aldo was waiting for an epiphany of some sort. He felt confident that there would be a moment when all the disjointed parts that made Charlotte Regan so incomprehensible to him would form a recognizable shape, and then he would understand the basis of the problem.
Everyone, in Aldo’s experience, could be quantified by the things that mattered to them. Take his father, for instance. Masso was made up of an abandonment complex, a reflexive protectiveness, a love of great food, and a weighty sense of responsibility. Thus, Masso required habit, reassurance, and a certain degree of shielding from the truth. Aldo, who understood this and could predict his father’s behavior to a reliable degree of precision, was therefore able to concentrate on other things.