Sublime

(She was, what, thirty-five? In that moment, I found her thrillingly jaded.)

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

She looks like a half-finished painting, she observes, waiting for the artist to come back and add the detail.