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last of her eggs with a corner of toast. “Oh, she’ll be around forever. The talent is too great. The question is: what’s left for the rest of us to do?”
    â€œSomething else,” said Nancy. “Come meet Tom.”
    â€œAll right.”
    And so the two women, now no longer strangers, went to the Algonquin. In the hotel lobby they were waylaid by a set of wild sketches: distorted limbs, club-footed dancers with staring eyes, a small, eerie exhibit. Nancy was repelled, but Liz called them joyous monsters, and that’s how Tom found his wife and Liz Moore together, arguing about elephant-footed ballerinas.
    It wasn’t until many, many years later, as C.C. was going through household things with her mother, paring down after Dr. Davis’s death, that she re-discovered whose paintings her mother and Liz had seen in the Algonquin lobby: Zelda Fitzgerald’s. Zelda, too, had gone to the O’Keefe exhibit that spring, and had come away thinking O’Keefe’s flowers “lovely and magnificent and heart-breaking,” a counter-point to Lizzie’s succinct judgment of pornography, while Nancy thought them merely rowdy.
    And then the years passed, years in which people like the Fitzgeralds, or Stieglitz and O’Keefe or later, even Liz Moore, were presented to Nancy not in the flesh, but in words: in biographies, retrospectives, history. Nancy retreated. All those words about people she’d known, making them over into people she had never met or did not recognize, until, slowly, she forgot them all.
    Â 
    â™¦

    â€œAugust in New York,” sang Liz in an uncertain, gravelly tenor. “It feels so enervati–ing.” She smiled.
    â€œThat’s autumn,” said Quiola, “which is exciting. Or embracing. Something cool, at any rate. Here we are –” The cabbie braked. Abandoning the Metropolitan, the three women had caught a cab, which Quiola directed to Prince Street, to a bistro in NoLita. C.C. stepped out first, helping Liz, who complained under her breath about the sagging of car seats making it hard on old bones, while Quiola paid the tab.
    The bistro, a long narrow nook of a place with a pebbled outdoor garden in the back, wasn’t busy. The hostess led them to a table that overlooked the garden.
    â€œDoes it feel like autumn to you?” said Lizzie as they marched down the narrow aisle of floor between the tables. “No, it feels like August, in April. Disgusting. I’d much rather be sitting out there –” she pointed to the empty garden, “– but we would roast.”
    â€œThis place reminds me of the Left Bank – I thought you didn’t like Paris,” said C.C. to Quiola as the host handed around menus.
    â€œImpossible!” said Liz. “Not to like Paris.”
    â€œBut true,” said Quiola. “I hate Paris.”
    Liz stared, as if Quiola had sprouted horns.
    â€œOkay, so I do love the food. That, I miss.
Où est ma boulangerie
? That’s what I want to know when I come home.”
    â€œ
Ici
,” said the waitress.
    â€œOf course. Right here. How’ve you been, Carol?”
    The girl smiled. “Fine. Can’t wait for the fall. My last semester.”
    And so the three chatted to Carol for a moment about college, her plans, the menu. When they were through with the order, C.C. excused herself to the restroom.
    As soon as she was out of earshot, Liz bore down. “Quiola. I know C.C.’s lying to me. Don’t lie to me.”
    â€œWhat did she tell you?”
    â€œNothing. You tell. Quick. Before that little liar gets back.”
    â€œIf C.C. –”
    Liz gripped the younger woman’s wrist with one bony hand as if the two women were teenagers, or sisters, with secrets between them. “Don’t. I have a right to know.”
    â€œDo you? Let go of me.”
    But Liz had other plans, and her blanched green stare make that clear.