The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

The less you say, the fewer questions you invite. It is something to live by.

And Nina needs to go to bed.’ He glances down, and Hal follows his gaze to where a tiny dachshund sits, quite still, the black beads of her eyes trained on her master. Then Gaspari nods to them both and moves away, the dog trotting at his heels.

There are patterns to their movements, varying from season to season, that he is learning to read. He has told me about the queen, the female workers, the male drones. How they build and clean their hive, how they make, dry and store the honey, how they could make a new queen, if they needed one, in a special cell in the honeycomb. The ordinary worker-bee larva becomes something extraordinary, becomes a mother. Just sometimes I think that if we could make ourselves a new mother – or if we could make me into a real adult – things might be easier for us.

‘You know, my friend, I have found that the best way to come to terms with one’s past is like this, through talk. It is painful, but, little by little, it helps to diffuse its power.’

‘I think, in art, it is as noble a thing to try to make people happy, to help them escape, as it is to make them think. And perhaps more difficult.’

So I watch them jealously, the families. These are people who have been bombed out of their homes, who think, perhaps, that they have lost everything. I wonder if they will come to realize that what they have here is everything that matters.

Fame, he thinks, has a great deal to answer for. It rewards behaviour that should otherwise be stamped out long before adulthood. He will find some way of making sure that some trace of this infiltrates his piece.

For all his bizarreness of appearance – he arrives at dinner in a purple Chinese silk tunic and matching trousers – and his great age, he is lucid as the grappa that is handed around after the meal.

‘You see now someone who is not afraid to be the person she truly is – who will wear the colours she wants to, who will let herself grow old without mourning the loss of her beauty. Because I am free to do as I choose, be exactly how I want to be. He made me see that it could be like that. And that is what love is, I think. But my former marriage – you would not have recognized me then.’

The cobbled walkway up to the town is fringed by an embarrassment of flowers: reds and pinks, yellow and purple and white: colours that might never be put together by design. But nature, who knows nothing of convention, has the audacity of a genius.

We all have different selves, I think, that we become, or promote, depending on the company.

I find myself on the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Astor Place and Union Square that they call ‘Book Row’.

‘You and I don’t know one another well enough to discover the things we will hate about each other yet. That’s all it is.’