Gallery Nights

The heat came early this year. June and already the tar on the roof smelled soft when I stepped out at dusk. I'm Doreen Mullins, sixty-two years old, owner of one small gallery on Water Street and one apartment on the fourth floor above a noodle shop. No husband. No kids. A cat named Prints who judges me nightly.

The phone rang on a Monday while I was eating cold pasta over the sink. I nearly didn't answer. Unknown number, and I get enough robocalls about my car's extended warranty, which I do not own.

"Hello?"

"Doreen? It's Lyle. Lyle Gentry."

Well. My knees did a thing. I sat down on the edge of the sink counter because standing suddenly felt ambitious.

"Fifteen years," I said. "Fifteen years and you call on a Monday while I'm eating out of a Tupperware."

"I'm back in town," he said. "Retired. Three blocks from you, actually, the walk-up on Pier Street. I saw the gallery in the paper. Your name was in it."

"You read the paper now? You're officially old."

"Sixty-four last September. So yes!"

We talked for forty minutes. He asked about the gallery, about Prints, about whether I still burned garlic. I asked where he'd been all this time and he said upstate, a fire house outside Syracuse, twenty-six years total and a bad knee to show for it. Then he went quiet in that way he has, the pause before the real thing.

"There's a reason I called," he said. "I'd like to see you. If you'd like that."

I looked at the harbor light through the kitchen window. My heart was doing something unprofessional.

"I would," I said. "Yes!"

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

---

He came up to my rooftop garden the next evening, and I heard his boots on the stairs before I saw him. He wore jeans and, God help me, his old uniform shirt. The navy one, unbuttoned halfway over a white undershirt, the brass buttons still bright. The collar was loose. He'd kept the damn thing all these years.

"You wore that on purpose," I said.

"Absolutely on purpose," he said. "You used to look at it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you were pricing it."

He laughed and I laughed and we sat in the mismatched chairs by my tomatoes. The harbor did its orange sunset thing. He'd brought a bottle of red wine that was actually good, which felt like a personal insult to every date I'd had since him.

We talked about nothing for an hour. His knee. My hip. The gallery's air conditioner, which dies every July like clockwork. Then his hand moved on the armrest and the back of his fingers grazed mine. Just barely. My whole arm lit up like a struck match.

"Doreen," he said, quiet. "Tell me to stop and I stop."

"I know that," I said. "I remember that about you."

"I haven't stopped thinking about you. Not in a way I'm proud of, either. A grown man, sixty-four, daydreaming like a fool."

"Are you asking me something?"

"I'm asking if I can hold your hand like we're twenty-six and broke."

So I turned my hand over and he took it. Simple as that. His palm was rougher than it used to be. We sat like that until the stars came out and Prints yowled through the roof door, annoyed at being locked out of whatever this was.

---

The second evening was Thursday. He brought takeout dumplings and the same shirt, buttoned one higher this time, which I suspect was a strategy.

He stood at the railing looking at the water and I caught myself staring at the collar. The fabric of those uniform shirts is crisp in a way nothing else is. Starched and stiff and it holds a crease like a promise.

"Stop staring at my collar, woman," he said, not turning around.

"Make me."

He turned, and then he did the thing. He reached up and adjusted the collar, slow, two fingers sliding under the edge, tugging it straight, and it was the most obscene thing I've seen done to a shirt. I'm a grown woman. I've owned a gallery for twenty years. I blushed.

"You're doing that on purpose," I said.

"Every bit of it."

"Come here," I said. "The button. Let me look at the button."

He came and stood in front of my chair. The brass button sat right at the middle of his chest, warm from him. I put my finger on it and it was smooth and hot and I felt his breathing through it.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Okay," I said.

I traced the button with one fingertip and then the stitching around it. He caught my hand before I could pull it back and turned it over and kissed my palm. Just that. A kiss on the palm, and I made a noise that I'm glad the harbor wind covered.

"Thursday," he said against my hand. "Two nights in. You sure about the pace?"

"I'm sixty-two, Lyle. I don't need a slow pace. I need a sure one."

He grinned. "Fair."

---

The third evening was Saturday, hotter, and the rooftop held the day's heat like a bowl. I'd changed my shirt twice. That's a true confession and I stand by it.

He came up the stairs carrying nothing this time, which I noted. No wine. No dumplings. No props.

"No offerings?" I said.

"Just me."

"Bold."

He sat next to me instead of across from me. Close. Our chairs were practically one chair. The heat had nothing to do with why my face was warm.

"Tonight," he said, "I'd like to take the shirt off. If that's alright with you."

"That's very alright with me."

He stood and unbuttoned it. Slow, top to bottom, unhurried, the way he does everything, and I understood suddenly that the slowness was the whole point. Each brass button came loose with a small sound. The shirt hung open over the white undershirt and then he pulled that off too, over his head, and stood there in the porch light with his shirt in one hand.

He's sixty-four and he looks like it, and it's the best looking I've ever seen a man. Gray chest hair. The old burn scar on his left side from a call in his forties, he'd told me the story once. Shoulders still broad from decades of hauling hose and ceilings and people. Soft at the belly. Real.

"Say something," he said. "You're doing your pricing face."

"Add it to the gallery," I said. "I'd sell you by Friday."

He laughed and sat back down and took my hand. He didn't put it anywhere. He just waited, which is the most maddening generous thing a man can do.

"Touch me however you want," he said. "Or not at all. Either way I'm staying for the stars."

I ran my fingers over the shirt draped across his knee first. That fabric. Coarse and stiff and it had a smell of him now, cedar and laundry soap and thirty years of fire houses. I pressed my palm flat into it.

"You really kept this thing for fifteen years," I said.

"I really did. Moved it to three different closets."

"Romantic and organized. No wonder I never got over you."

"Who says I got over you?"

I slid my hand up over his knee, along the rough thigh of his jeans, and he guided me with his hand over mine, steady, up to his hip, and stopped me there, thumb pressing my knuckles.

"Doreen. Look at me."

I looked at him.

"I'm not going anywhere this time," he said. "I bought a damn condo. I have a dentist here. You can take all night or all summer, and either way I'll be here Tuesday."

"That's a lot of promise for a man whose shirt I haven't even gotten off his shoulders."

"Then take your time."

So I did. I laid my palm on his shoulder, then the other, slow, feeling his skin go warm under my hands, and he shivered in ninety-degree heat, which did something to my confidence that no gallery review ever has. I leaned in and put my mouth on his collarbone, and he let out a long breath like he'd been holding it since Syracuse.

"Inside," he said, rough. "Or up here. Your call. But I'd like to keep going, and I'd like to know where."

"Up here," I said. "The stars are already paid for."

He stood and offered me his hand and I took it, and we stayed out under the stars until the roof finally cooled, Prints watching from the roof door like a small furry chaperone with opinions about my life choices. Lyle took the shirt off his knee and laid it over my chair, right where I could reach it. Smart man.

The fourth evening was Sunday. I checked the clock twice that afternoon at the gallery, which is embarrassing but true. A man offers you his chest on a Saturday and then your whole Sunday becomes a waiting room.

He came up the stairs at seven with a paper bag of peaches and the shirt back on, buttoned again, like time had rewound. That navy fabric. That collar. I swear the man knew exactly what he was doing.

"Peaches," he said, holding up the bag. "From the stand on Route 1."

"You're currying favor with fruit now."

"Is it working?"

"Jury's out. Sit."

He sat. We ate peaches over the harbor and the juice ran down our wrists and he handed me napkins from his jacket pocket, a man who plans ahead, which he does, always has. Then he set the last peach pit on the rail and looked at me.

"Tonight," he said, "I thought I'd give you a little more. If you want it."

"Define more."

"I'd like to unzip. Keep the belt on. Keep the buckle. Everything else opens up and you can touch me through the boxers. That's the whole offer."

I put my peach down because my hands weren't steady enough to hold it anymore. "That's a strange and specific offer, Lyle Gentry."

"I'm a strange and specific man. You knew that at forty-seven."

"I did. It's why I let you hang around the gallery for two summers pretending to care about seascapes."

"You cared about the seascapes too."

"I cared about the painter. Different thing."

He stood up, and this time he didn't do it slow. He just undid his belt enough to work the zipper, kept the buckle closed and sitting there on his hip like a brass promise, and pulled his jeans down his thighs and sat back on the blanket I'd started keeping up there in a basket. For him. Not that I'd admit that to anyone.

"Come here," he said. "Or don't. You can look all night if looking's your speed."

"Looking was never my speed."

I knelt next to him on the blanket. The shirt was open over his chest, buttons undone, and below that the white boxers and below that a very obvious situation. My mouth watered. That's the plain truth of it. Sixty-two years old and my