Quest for Anna Klein, The by Thomas H. Cook

seemed to himthat she had immediately absorbed various aspects of the room — the dark paneling, the lighted bar, the older man with his young mistress — that she had made careful note and would be able to recall these things, as a musician might remember the melody of a theme heard only once.
    â€œWould you like something to drink?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps a glass of wine?”
    â€œI’d rather have a cup of tea,” Anna said. She drew the scarf from her head, and in the way he’d noticed many times before, she seemed momentarily uncomfortable, as if even this modest disrobing was inappropriately seductive. She reminded him of the serving girls of Ireland who kept their eyes averted even as they placed or removed plates, as if doing otherwise would somehow compromise their chastity. How old it truly was, he thought, the Old World.
    He motioned the barmaid over to the table and ordered.
    They talked of nothing in particular. The wine and tea came. Danforth lifted his glass in a toast. “To your success,” he said.
    She smiled softly, touched his glass with her cup, then focused her attention on a young couple who’d taken a remote corner table, their hands locked together, their gaze intensely fixed on each other, everything else quite invisible to them.
    â€œThey must be in love,” she said.
    The way she said it had an eerie inwardness to it that made Danforth recall the death of Henry Stanley, the great explorer. He’d lived near Big Ben at the end, and not long before his death, the great bell had sounded, a somber accounting that had awakened an inexpressible understanding in him. “How strange,” Stanley had murmured, “so that is time.”
    Danforth had no idea how to say any of this, however, and so he said, “I take it you’ve never been in love?”
    She shook her head. “No,” she said. “And you?”
    He thought of Cecilia, with whom he’d been out only the nightbefore, how bright her smile was, the life that sparkled in her, the happiness she offered him, everything, everything but . . . what?
    â€œYes,” he said, and put that
but
. . .
what?
aside.
    â€œIt must be wonderful,” Anna said.
    â€œI’m sure you’ll know someday,” Danforth told her.
    She nodded crisply, as if cutting off an irrelevant discussion. “I’m leaving for Europe soon,” she told him.
    This news, coming to him by way of Anna herself, made her imminent departure more real, and Danforth felt the disquiet not only of her going but of the loss of some vital opportunity. It was as if he’d made a minimal offer on something small and precious but had lost it to a higher bidder.
    â€œWould you like to have dinner?” he asked, since there now seemed little else he could give her. “We could have it in the Palm Garden.”
    Anna considered this a moment. “No,” she said finally. “Let’s have it at my apartment. If you don’t mind leftovers.”
    â€œYour apartment?”
    â€œWouldn’t you like to see where I live?”
    In anyone else, the question might have been fraught with romantic tension, but coming from Anna it seemed only a closer adherence to Clayton’s suggestion that they be together in more intimate settings.
    â€œAll right,” Danforth said. “I’ll call for a taxi.”
    â€œNo,” Anna said immediately. “Let’s take the bus.”
    And so they did, a long ride down Fifth Avenue, past Saks’ lighted windows filled with the clothes of the coming summer season, brightly colored bathing suits and leisurewear, the loose-fitting garb of the city’s moneyed class. The clothing would be bought and bundled up and taken out to the Hamptons or Fire Island or, farther still, Wellfleet or Martha’s Vineyard, the loomingwar in Europe causing the only change in this yearly migration, Paris and Rome abruptly no longer on the