After Hours. Sandra Field

lot of people. No chance for intimacy. Sounds good.

      Marcia went into the bedroom, which faced west and was filled with the fading light of evening. Raindrops were beating against the windowpane in a miniature tattoo. Firmly closing her mind to the prospect of a hot bath, Marcia rummaged through her closet. Lucy always had been too intuitive for comfort. So the persona of the Marcia she had always been was going to be firmly in place. Cool, competent Marcia, in control of her own life. Unemotional, detached Marcia, who never made demands.

      All her movements neat and efficient, she stripped off her work clothes, had a quick shower and dressed in a navy blue linen suit whose tailored elegance was worth every penny she had paid for it. Silky navy hose, Italian leather pumps and discreet gold jewelry came next. Expertly she applied her make-up. Then she brushed her sleek dark hair, in its expensive cut that curved just below her ears, and checked her appearance in the full-length mirror in her bedroom.

      She didn’t look thirty-three.

      Not that it really mattered how old she looked.

      Hastily she jammed her big horn-rimmed glasses on her nose. She could have worn her contacts. But her glasses gave her something to hide behind—and to meet Lucy she needed all the help she could get. Grabbing her shiny forest-green raincoat and still-damp umbrella from the hall closet, she left her condo and took the elevator to the basement.

      She’d go straight to the gallery, meet the famous Quentin Ramsey, make appreciative noises about every one of his multiple personalities and invite Lucy and Troy to dinner on Sunday along with the rest of the family. And then she’d come home, duty done.

      Multiple Personalities, she thought crossly, backing out of her parking lot. What kind of a name was that for a bunch of paintings? Too clever by half. Too cutesy. Altogether too self-conscious. He might be Lucy and Troy’s friend, but that didn’t mean that she, Marcia, had to like him.

      Scowling, she pressed the remote control to open the garage door, and drove out into the rain swept evening.

      

      Quentin, too, had checked his appearance in the mirror before he’d left for the art gallery. The amount of money he’d had to spend to get a decent suit that he planned to wear no more than half a dozen times a year had astounded him. He looked like an ad in a glossy men’s magazine, he thought irritably, hitching. at the knot in his silk tie: “The Successful Artist of the 90s. Man-abouttown Quentin Ramsey attending the opening of his highly successful show Multiple Personalities.”

      What in hell had possessed him to come up with that title?

      He ran a comb through his thick black curls, which instantly went right back to their usual state of disarray. He grinned at himself, feeling somewhat more cheerful. At least his hair refused to do the correct thing. And he’d always hated openings. Hated them with a passion.

      He painted to communicate—no doubt about that. He didn’t want his works stashed away in a studio with their faces to a wall. But he couldn’t stand to hear people discussing them, stereotyping them, analyzing all their vitality out of existence with words like “deconstructionism” and “post modern abstractionism”. At least the critics had had to come up with some new labels for this show, he thought, grinning again. Time he shook them up a bit.

      Someone would be bound to tell him that his new style was a cop-out in the interests of commercialism. And someone else would be sure to praise his raw honesty. For some reason his kind of honesty was nearly always called raw.

      Speaking of which, he’d forgotten to eat anything.

      Quentin went to the minibar and pilfered its entire stock of peanuts and pretzels. Chewing absently, he realized how much he was looking forward to seeing Lucy and Troy. He’d turned down their invitation to dinner because he had to be at the gallery early. But, if he had his way, he’d end up the evening at the apartment they’d rented and he’d take off his tie and his shiny leather shoes that were already pinching his feet, and toss back a beer or two. And he’d be sure to admire the new baby. He knew rather more than most people what that baby meant to them.

      And as soon as he could he’d get out of Ottawa. Too tidy a city for him. Too prettified. He wanted pine trees and running water and maybe a mountain or two.

      Not a hotel room—no matter how luxurious.

      He opened the second bag of pretzels. What he really needed to do was take a break from painting and build another house. The bite of saw into lumber, the sweet smell of wood chips, the satisfaction of seeing a roof line cut into the sky—they all anchored him to a reality very different from that of paint on canvas. It was a reality he was beginning to crave.

      There was nothing new about this. In his travels around the world Quentin had always alternated periods of intense artistic activity with the more mundane and comforting reality of house construction. What was new was that the house he wanted to build this time was a house for himself. His own walls. His own roof.

      He glanced at his watch and gave an exclamation of dismay. Grabbing his raincoat, he ran for the elevator, and in the lobby of the hotel hailed a cab. But as he was driven through the gleaming wet streets, still chewing on the pretzels, his thoughts traveled with him. He wanted to settle down. He’d been a nomad ever since he’d left his parents’ yard at the age of three to follow the milk truck down the road, but now he wanted to have a place that he could call home.

      It had been a long time since that little boy had stumbled along the dirt ruts, hollering at the milkman to wait for him. He was thirty-six now. And while he wanted a home, there was more to it than that. He wanted a woman to share that home. To share his home. His bed. His life. But she had to be the right woman.

      He gazed vaguely at the beds of tulips that edged the road, neat blocks of solid color that moved him not at all. He’d been considerably older than three—eleven, perhaps—when he’d come to the conclusion that he’d know the woman he was meant to marry from the first moment he saw her. He knew perfectly well where that conviction had come from. His parents had had—he now realized, as an adult—the kind of marriage that happens only rarely. A marriage alive with love, laughter and passion, with fierce conflicts and an honesty that could indeed have been called raw.

      He hadn’t been able to verbalize this at age eleven, but he had intuited that there was something very special between the man and woman who were his parents. One of the often-told stories of his childhood had been how they had fallen in love at first sight, recognizing each other instantly as the partner each had been waiting for.

      At the age of twenty-five, impatient, he’d ignored that certainty and married Helen. And within six weeks had known that he’d done the wrong thing. He’d hung in to the very best of his ability, and when she’d left him for a bank president twice her age had heaved a sigh of relief and vowed never to repeat that particular mistake.

      Quentin was not a vain man, and it never ceased to surprise him that women flocked to him like blue jays to a feeder on a cold winter’s day. Tall women, short women, beautiful women, sexy women. But not one of them so far had touched his soul.

      What if he never found this mythical woman? Was he a fool to believe in the romantic dream of an eleven-year-old?

      Maybe if he built the house first she’d somehow follow, as naturally as sunrise was bound to follow sunset.

      Or maybe he was a fool even to think of settling down. He’d always rather prided himself on being a free spirit, going where he pleased when he pleased and staying as long as he pleased. If he got married, he wouldn’t be able to do that.

      The right woman... did she even exist?

      He tried to wrench his mind away from thoughts that were, he’d sometimes concluded, both non-productive and infantile. The taxi swished through a puddle and drew up outside the gallery. Pots of scarlet tulips decorated the sidewalk, standing stiff and tall in the rain, like valiant soldiers on watch. I’m lonely, Quentin thought with a flash of insight. Despite my success, despite the incredible freedom of the way I live, I’m lonely.

      “Ten seventy-five,