19 Purchase Street Read Free Page A

except what she considered her blessings. Before long, there was the George Washington Bridge, its blue lines softened by unclear air, and in less than a quarter hour Norma turned onto East Forty-ninth Street, parked in the garage across from the United Nations Plaza. She took the suitcase up to her apartment in that building.
    All the apartments that faced south had unobstructed downstream views of the East River. The United Nations building was practically in their front yard. Naturally, they were choice, most expensive. Norma’s apartment had north and east exposures, nearly no skyline and only an oblique, somewhat restricted view of the river. Still it was in the four hundred thousand class. Being on the twenty-seventh floor gave it premium, that much out of range of the city’s true surface.
    Five rooms. Done mainly with furniture and accessories she’d found in Europe. Almost every trip over she had something sent back. Such as the calling card tray on the table in the foyer. A bronze of a girl in dishabillé , her arms extended to support an oversized scallop shell. Norma had come upon it five trips ago in Paris at the Marche aux Puces . She’d paid the very first asking price for it because she liked it so much, and after the transaction the stallkeeper, in a rare moment of candor, had told her she should have bargained. The foyer table itself she’d found in Amsterdam at an unlikely out-of-the-way shop that bought piece by piece from elderly people in its neighborhood. Norma believed that table with its graceful tapered legs and marquetry top had been most reluctantly exchanged by someone for mere subsistence.
    In such manner she enjoyed personal connections to those things around her. It helped take some of the edge off living alone.
    Now in her kitchen she poured a Perrier over ice, added a bit of Rose’s lime juice and watched the swirl of the lime until she stirred it away with a long sterling silver spoon that could also be sipped through. She drew some into her mouth on her way to the bedroom.
    There she sat in the chair she most often sat in, settled and let out a breath that was inadvertently a sigh. Everything here was in place, she thought, even every magazine. It would be exciting if someone, a certain someone, would suddenly appear and cause disarray. Wasn’t it strange when she was with that person she could even let her clothes drop off just anywhere and not be bothered by it?
    Her thought went to tomorrow and then the day after tomorrow, her birthday. Thursday she’d be thirty-eight, which on the chronological see-saw between thirty-five and forty was an altogether different balance. Norma, thirty-eight. It seemed the older she got the more she felt the name Norma suited her, as though time was on a convergent course with a predestined image. Futile to hope the two would never merge, she thought.
    To her rescue came the desire to be elsewhere. At first anywhere else and then a particular place, because at that moment she needed to be kissed. Not just the light pressing of lips but rather her mouth crowded by another tongue in it, an identical part stroking, becoming resolute and extended within her to its limit, wanting to surpass that, stretching inward until the little ligaments beneath the tongue ached, stabbing as though furious at the impossibility of filling her, and taking persistent licks at the tiny sideways crotches of her lips, left and right.
    Norma’s eyes had closed involuntarily. She opened them but required movement to come almost all the way out of it. She took up a hand mirror from the side table, a silver art nouveau one etched with dragonflies and lily spears. Not intending serious self-appraisal. She glanced at her reflection only long enough to verify it.
    She was a handsome woman, strikingly close to beautiful. Her features were definite and pleasingly related, although her mouth had a way of normally being a little too set and at times when