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against the light. “Lovely color, this Vouvray.”
    “Indeed.” Marion sipped, waiting; Barry was thinking again. She gave him a verbal nudge. “Was it at the Louvre that she told you she liked it?”
    Barry nodded, and turned from the window. He switched on some lamps, then sat again. “Are you famished?”
    “I’m getting there.”
    “There’s a little French place around the corner—”
    “Wait, wait. I want to hear about the Louvre first.”
    “You have to understand about that meeting. It wasn’t anyone else’s Fedora then, just mine.”
    “How d’you mean, ‘just’ yours?”
    “I mean you don’t bump into Fedora every day; she doesn’t just appear and start talking to you—”
    “Why did she talk to you?”
    “Impulse, perhaps. Maybe she wanted to speak with an American—we were still popular in Paris after the war. She’d been cooped up in the Sobryanskis’ château for six years, she was tired of Switzerland—said they were trying to make her fat. But the way I saw her that day, she might have been just anybody. And the remarkable thing was I liked her, I really liked her. It was this way:
    “When the war ended in 1945, I was twenty. I’d been in the Army for three years. They were about to send me back to the States on a troopship, but I thought I wanted to stick around Europe awhile. I had myself transferred onto the staff of Stars and Stripes, which I’d been doing some minor pieces for, and a year later I was mustered out. I thought writing was okay, but I wanted to try painting, too, and I made tracks for Paris. I spent a lot of money on brushes and paints, an easel, and I settled down to be a great artist, with a girl I’d met in one of the cafés on the Boul Mich.
    “One rainy afternoon—this was in March and it was quite cold—I went off to the Louvre to sketch, and Denyse—that was her name—was to meet me there at four. We were going to see Les Enfants du Paradis, which Carné had made during the Occupation, but I’d never seen. It was playing on the Champs Élysées.
    “I was sketching in one of the sculpture galleries. You know the Canova at the top of the stairs at the Metropolitan? A similar figure, but smaller, less heroic. It was about a quarter to four and the light was getting bad, and I thought the drawing was, too. A young French couple had come by and they were studying the statue. Neither of them seemed to know much about art, but they appeared interested, so I told them what I knew about the figure, that it was a representation of the Greek hero Perseus, and the grisly snake-crowned head was Medusa, the Gorgon, whom he’d slain before he won the beautiful Andromeda.
    “We chatted awhile, they thanked me and wandered off among the statues. I thought the place was empty, then I heard a woman’s voice, but not Denyse’s. She said in English, ‘What makes you think you know so much?’ Not harshly, but with this frank directness and a kind of ironic humor. I recognized her right away. She was chic in a simple Chanel suit, a long wool coat, no hat, and dark glasses, which on her were as revealing as her naked eyes would have been. Seeing my expression, she laughed, that same movie laugh I thought I’d heard a hundred times.
    “‘You recognize me?’
    “‘Certainly.’
    “‘Too bad.’ She adjusted her dark glasses. ‘I should have worn my mask. “Rien d’ailleurs ne rassure autant qu’un masque.” You know that line?’
    “‘Yes; Colette.’
    “‘Very good. I am dining with her tonight.’ She asked me if I’d seen her movie Andromeda, and her expression seemed to take for granted that I had. ‘Did you like it?’ I said yes, but that I’d liked others better. Which? That’s when I told her about the Dixie cup cover and the chocolate ice cream, and then about wetting my pants at Madagascar and my mother taking me out. I saw that I’d made a faux pas, that she didn’t like being reminded of her age, and I tried to make a recovery. I