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me. I came back to myself, finding myself leaning ever more tightly against him, excited by the perverse eroticism of this painting, not lewd, but brutal in the way it both drew and repelled me.
    “You remind me of her.” Rand bent to whisper into my ear, gazing at the painting.
    “Not the teacher, I assume,” I whispered back, feeling aroused again by his breath and the tone of his whisper, a lover’s flirtation.
    “Not the teacher,” he agreed, his whisper holding laughter.
    “Am I as plain as Thérèse, or even Georgette?” I whispered, naming two of the models the artist had used. I wanted to hear Rand flatter and praise me. I wanted him to find me beautiful, I who had always scorned men’s come-ons when they complimented my looks. I, who had always dismissed beauty, because the world had found me beautiful. I would say, “I had nothing to do with it. It’s genetics, the luck of the draw,” my cloak of humility. How cavalier I had been! And now I wanted affirmation, I wanted this man to want me the way my body wanted him. I could hardly think except how sexual desire kept growing in me, and was this my comeuppance for the indifferent way I had treated all the other men who had courted me? What a way to pay for my sins!
    “You are
so
not plain,” he laughed, “and surely everyone has told you that all your life.” A man used to dealing with privileged women, confident. But then he seemed afraid he had offended me and quickly added, “And that’s
not
something I’m just saying.” Ernest. His arm around me seemed to tighten by microns, but I felt the enclosing sweetness of it.
    “Merci.”
Was I, who was never coy, thanking him in
French
? Was I crazy? Any other time I would have thought, “get hold of yourself.” Now I did not care, even if I seemed like a fool in my own eyes. Bimbo-giggly French. Holy cow indeed.
    I had no more emotional energy to linger here, and my look told him that I was ready to leave. He steered us back to the entry door, the guard hurrying ahead of us to open it, and then locking it behind him, joining us as we rapidly crossed the workrooms and back to the elevator.
    “Let’s go out the front way,” I told Rand, and the guard, hearing me, pushed the button for the main lobby rather than the garage level. I needed time to cool down after my major internal foray into the wonder of slutty lust. I was still caught by my own reserve, that internal struggle between passion and control that can lead to surrender or to parting.
    The elevator door opened in a small recess on the main floor. We thanked the guard for his help, receiving his solemn-faced nod as we exited. We walked, not talking, past the gorgeous Greek statuary and urns, turning to the main lobby. The guards there looked at us quizzically because we did not have the little entry decals on us showing we had formally entered the museum. No one had thought of this, but we passed the guards quickly into the neutral great lobby where you could sit with no decal.
    As usual, large numbers of visitors were milling around, some seated on the benches opposite the gift shops, some taking brochures from the slotted outer counter of the great central desk. Within the desk’s enclosure were the multi-lingual staff and volunteers for the polyglot crowd visiting New York. The great dinosaur skeletons were across the park on the West Side, but here along Fifth Avenue was “Museum Mile,” the Jewish Museum a glory in the upper reaches of the magical area, coming southward to pass the Guggenheim and other breath-stopping landmarks. These were interspersed with embassies and impossibly expensive residences, and concluded with this magnificent museum.
    We exited the main doors, descending the steps to Fifth Avenue. Rand had sent some kind of signal to Tom, because hestood waiting outside Rand’s car at the curb beneath us. The day was too beautiful and my body too heated and wild for me to want to be driven anywhere just yet. The late