He is wearing one of those expensive suits that have an effortless fluidity to them. Two women going into the museum give him long looks, and their hips start to sway as they walk past him. As he kisses me he says, “I’d forgotten that you always smell like roses. Or do you just smell like England? Roses and summer lawns.” He ushers me into the restaurant. Ladies who lunch, in Chanel and pearls, are all around us. Everything has a high-modernist feel: white walls and beautiful angles, sunlight pouring through all the glass. I could almost believe, doing a doctorate on Thiebaud, that I belong amid all this excellence and elegance. “It’s a great setting for a restaurant,” I say to Mitchell as the waiter brings us bread and water and we unfold the soft white napkins. “I know,” says Mitchell. “I love that it has such a high ceiling.” I look up. Air is all that is overhead, for a long way. The air has its own quality of piercing clarity, like Arctic air, with the moneyed voices of the women tinkling up into it.
