Cleo stepped out of the doorway and held his shoulders to take him in. Something about his face was different. His eyes looked clearer; she could see now that they were not brown, as she had always thought, but a golden hazel. It was as though the lights had come on inside him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her until they were cheek to cheek. He felt like a great tent collapsing around the central pole of her body.
“Come inside,” she said into his ear.
Frank followed her into the dark, cool entrance hall. She led him up the stairs to a sunlit landing, pointing out the kitchen and laundry with the shy pride of a student on Parents’ Day. Scattered on the kitchen table were several empty wine bottles left standing from the night before, deep crimson rings marking the wood’s surface. Frank stared at them with a mixture of relief and longing. He would never again sit after dinner like that, talk passionately about absolutely nothing like that, refilling glass after glass while evening unspooled into night. Cleo followed his gaze. Frank had told her he’d stopped drinking when he called from New York to suggest visiting. Six months, he’d said, but she’d had trouble believing it. Now, she could see that he was different sober, softer. Whatever defense alcohol had given him was gone.
“Do you want water?” she asked. “Or tea? Milk? Tea with milk?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “It’s just my first time traveling like this, you know. I feel a bit …”
“Tender?”
Frank smiled. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly the word for it.” They looked at each other, and a frisson of warmth passed between them. “Why don’t you show me your room?” he asked.
Her bedroom looked like a mixture between a hospital room and a dormitory, with speckled linoleum floors and a single bed covered with a pink comforter. Postcards of paintings by Lee Krasner and Jay DeFeo covered the wall above her small desk. The Fine Art Institute seemed to Frank like a boarding school for adults, a space both personal and impersonal, reflecting a group of inhabitants who would necessarily leave. Cleo loved it for this very reason; it was a place dedicated to creating.
Frank perched on the bed and felt something hard beneath him. He reached under the blanket and pulled out a smooth oblong stone. It was a pale opalescent pink veined with white, about the length of his hand, cool to the touch and heavy to hold. He looked at Cleo, who laughed. “Whoops, I didn’t realize that was still in there.”
She lifted it from his palm and slid it into a cluttered desk drawer. Inside were leaves of thick inkblot paper streaked with watercolors, a tapered white feather, a pen with a plastic sunflower on the end.
“What is it?” Frank asked.
“It’s a crystal.” Cleo leaned against the desk to face him. A thin strip of belly between her T-shirt and jeans appeared, like the sun peeking between clouds. “To put inside you. Actually, Zoe told me about it. You can use it to open your chakras, heal trauma, that kind of stuff … You’re rolling your eyes.”
“I am not!”
“You’re rolling them on the inside. I can tell.”
“You cannot.”
But she could. Cleo’s ability to see into Frank had always irked and thrilled him. He had never felt seen, really seen, until he met her.
“Put it inside you how?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t swallow it.”
“It’s a sex thing?”
“It’s a healing thing.”
“You need that?”
Cleo smiled. “I need everything.”
“That’s the gift of being twenty-six,” said Frank. “You can try anything and appear hopeful. At forty-five you’re merely ridiculous, even to yourself.”
Cleo snorted. “What nonsense! Look at you and your meetings. You’re a whole new person!”
“Do you really think so?”
“You’re lighter. It’s a good thing.”
“What about you!” exclaimed Frank. “You chopped off all your hair.”
Cleo shook out her tulip-shaped bob. “I guess I’m lighter, too,” she said.
Frank nodded, smiling. “Did Zoe tell you about that sex-positive feminist group thing she started with the kids from Gallatin?”
Cleo eyes shone with amusement. “She sure did.”
“If she extols the power of the female orgasm to me one more time …”
Cleo threw her head back in a laugh. Zoe had indeed regaled her with stories about this the last time they spoke. She did behave as if she was the first woman to discover the clitoris, but her youthful enthusiasm was also charming.