“Wow, lady, what’s with you?”

“Nothing. Why?” She stood watching him work on a gouache. She liked it. She would have liked to buy it from him, but she couldn’t do that, and she wouldn’t let him give it to her. She knew he needed the money, and that was one commodity she was wise enough not to exchange with him.

“Well, you slammed the door, so I figured something must be bugging you.” He had given her back her keys.

“No, I’m just grumpy, I guess. Jet lag or something.” A smile broke through the anger in her eyes, and she dumped herself into a chair. “I missed you last night. Sometimes I wish you wouldn’t let me go anywhere.”

“Do I have that option?” He looked surprised and she laughed and kicked her shoes off.

“No.”

“That’s what I thought” It didn’t seem to bother him, and Kezia was beginning to feel better.

“I like the gouache.” She looked over his shoulder as he stepped back to observe the morning’s work.

“Yeah. Maybe it’ll be okay.” He was demolishing a box of chocolate cookies and looking secretly pleased. Suddenly he turned to face her and slipped his arms around her. “And what have you been up to since yesterday?”

“Oh, let’s see. I read eight books, ran a mile, went to a ball, ran for president. The usual stuff.”

“And somewhere in all that bullshit lies the truth, doesn’t it?” She shrugged and they exchanged a smile interspersed with kisses. He didn’t really care what she did when she wasn’t with him. He had his own life, his work, his loft, his friends. Her life was her own. “Personally, I suspect that the truth is that you ran for president.”

“I just can’t keep any secrets from you, Marcus.”

“No.” He said it while carefully unbuttoning her shirt. “No secrets at all…. Now there’s the secret I was looking for.” He tenderly uncovered one breast and leaned down to kiss it, as she slid her hands under his shirt and onto his back. “I missed you, Kezia.”

“Not half as much as I missed you.” A brief flash of the evening before raced through her mind. Visions of the dancing Baron. She pulled away from Mark then and smiled at him for a long moment. “You’re the most beautiful man in the world, Mark Wooly.”

“And your slave.” She laughed at him, because Mark was no one’s slave and they both knew it, and then, barefoot, she darted away from’ him and ran behind the easel, grabbing his box of chocolate cookies as she went.

“Hey!”

“Okay, Mark, now the truth will out. What do you love more? Me or your chocolate cookies?”

“What are you, crazy or something?” He chased her behind the easel but she fled to the bedroom doorway. “I love my chocolate cookies! What do you think?”

“Ha ha! Well, I’ve got them!” She ran into the bedroom and leapt onto the bed, dancing from one foot to the other, laughing, her eyes sparkling, her hair flying around her head like a flock of silky ravens.

“Give me my chocolate cookies, woman! I’m addicted!”

“Fiend!”

“Yeah!” He joined her on the bed with a gleam in his eye, took the cookies from her and flung them to the sheepskin chair, then pulled her into a tight embrace.

“Not only are you a hopeless chocoholic, Mark Wooly, but you’re a sex fiend too!” She laughed the laugh of her childhood as she settled into his arms.

“You know, maybe I’m addicted to you too.”

“I doubt it.” But he pulled her down beside him, and wrapped in laughter and her long black hair, they made love.

“What do you want for dinner?” She yawned and cuddled closer to him in the comfortable bed.

“You.”

“That was lunch.”

“So? There’s a law that says I can’t have for dinner what I had for lunch?” He rumpled her hair, and his mouth sought her lips.

“Come on, Mark, be serious. What else do you want? Besides chocolate cookies?”

“Oh … steak … lobster … caviar … the usual.” He didn’t know just how usual it was. “Oh shit, I don’t know. Pasta, I guess. Fettuccine maybe. Al pesto? Can you get some basil? The fresh kind?”

“You’re four months late. It’s out of season. How about clam sauce?”

“You’re on.”

“Then I’ll see you in a bit.” She ran her tongue across the small of his back, stretched once more and then hopped out of bed, just out of reach of the hand he held out for her. “None of that, Marcus. Later. Or we’ll never get dinner.”

“Screw dinner.” The light in his eyes was reviving.

“Screw you.”

“That’s just what I had in mind. Now you’ve got the picture.” He grinned broadly as he lay on his back and watched her dress. “You’re really no fun, Kezia, but you’re pretty to watch.”

“So are you.” His long frame was stretched out lazily atop the sheets. It occurred to her as she looked at him that there was nothing quite so beautiful as the bold good looks of a very young man, a very handsome young man….

She left the bedroom and returned with her string bag in hand, one of his shirts knotted just under her breasts above well-tailored jeans, her hair tied in a wisp of red ribbon.

“I ought to paint you like that.”

“You ought to stop being so silly. I’ll get a fat head. Any special requests?” He smiled, shook his head, and she was gone, off to the market.

There were Italian markets nearby, and she always liked to shop for him. Here, the food was real. Home-made pasta, fresh vegetables, oversized fruit, tomatoes to squeeze, a whole array of sausages and cheeses waiting to be felt and sniffed and taken home for a princely repast. Long loaves of Italian bread to carry home under your arm the way they did in Europe. Bottles of Chianti dancing from hooks near the ceiling.

It was a short walk, and it was the time of day when young artists began to come out of their lairs. The end of the day, when those who worked at night began to come alive, and those who worked by day needed to stretch and walk. Later there would be more people in the streets, wandering, talking, smoking grass, drifting, stopping in at the cafes, en route to the studios of friends or someone’s latest sculpture show. It was friendly in SoHo; everyone was hard at work. Companions on a shared journey of the soul. Pioneers in the world of art. Dancers, writers, poets, painters, they congregated here at the southern tip of New York, locked between the dying filth and litter of Greenwich Village and the concrete and glass of Wall Street. This was a softer place. A world of friends.

The woman in the grocery store knew her well.

“Ah signorina, comè sta?”

“Bene grazie, e lei?”

“Così così. Un po’ stanca. Che cosa vorebbe oggi?”

And Kezia wandered amidst the delicious smells and chose salami, cheese, bread, onions, tomatoes. Fiorella approved of her selections. Here was a girl who knew how to buy. She knew the right salami, what to put in a sauce, how a good Bel Paese should feel. She was a nice girl. Her husband was probably Italian. But Fiorella never asked.

Kezia paid and left with the string bag full. She stopped next door to buy eggs, and down the street she went into the delicatessen for three boxes of chocolate cookies, the kind he liked best. On her way back, she strolled slowly through the ever-thickening groups on the street. The aroma of fresh bread and salami wafted around her head, the smell of marijuana hung close by, the heavy scent of espresso drifted out of the cafés, while a rich twilight sky stretched overhead. It was a beautiful September, still warm, but the air felt cleaner than it usually did, and there were pink lights in the sky, like one of Mark’s early water-colors, rich in pastels. Pigeons cooed and waddled down the street, and bicycles leaned against buildings; here and there a child skipped rope.

“What’d you get?” Mark was lying on the floor, smoking a joint.

“What you ordered. Steak, lobster, caviar. The usual.” She blew him a kiss and dropped the packages on the narrow kitchen table.

“Yeah? You bought steak?” He looked more disappointed than hopeful.

“No. But Fiorella says we don’t eat enough salami. So I bought a ton of that.”

“Good. She must be a trip.” Before Kezia had come into his life, he had existed on navy beans and chocolate cookies. Fiorella was just another part of Kezia’s mystery, one of her many gifts to him.

“She is a trip. A good trip.”

“So are you. So are you.” She stood-in the kitchen doorway, her eyes alight, a twilight glow filling the room, and she looked back at Mark, sprawled on the floor.

“You know, once in a while I think I really love you, Marcus.”

“Once in a while I think I love you too.”

The look they shared said a multitude of things. There was no unpleasantness there, no pressure, no strain. No depth, but no hassles. There was merit in that, for both of them.

“Want to go for a walk, Kezia?”

“La passeggiata.”

He laughed softly at the word. She always called it that. “I haven’t heard that since you went away.”

“That’s what it always is to me, down here. Uptown, people walk. They run. They go crazy. Here, they still know how to live. Like in Europe. Le passeggiate, the walks Italians take every evening at dusk, and at noon on Sundays, in funny little old towns where most of the women wear black and the men wear hats and white shirts, baggy suits and no ties. Proud farmers, good people. They check out their scene, greet their friends. They do it right, it’s an institution to them. A ritual, a tradition, and I love it.” She looked content as she said it.

“So let’s go do it.” He rose slowly to his feet, stretched, and put an arm around her shoulders. “We can eat when we get back.”

Kezia knew what that meant. Eleven, maybe twelve o’clock. First they would walk, and then they would run into friends and stop to chat on the street for a while. It would get dark and they would take refuge in someone’s studio, so Mark could see the progress of a friend’s latest work, and eventually the studio would grow crowded so they would all go to The Partridge for wine. And suddenly, hours later, they would be starving, and Kezia would be serving fettuccine for nine. There would be candles and music, and laughter and guitars, and joints passed around until they were tiny wisps of paper in somebody’s roach clip. And Klee and Rousseau and Cassatt and Pollock would come alive in the room as their names flew among them. Paris in the days of the Impressionists must have been like that. Unloved outlaws of the art establishment banding together and forming a world of their own, to give each other laughter and courage and hope … until one day, somebody found them, made them famous, and offered them caviar to replace the chocolate cookies. It was a shame really. For their sakes, Kezia almost hoped they would never leave the fettuccine and the dusty floors of their studios and their magic nights far behind them, because then they would wear dinner jackets and brittle smiles and sad eyes. They would dine at “21” and dance at El Morocco and go to parties at the Maisonette.