turned out to be more information than I needed, because when the elevator reached her floor, she was there with her front door open, the loft behind her illuminated by the sun that was cascading in from the western-facing windows.
“I READ SOME of your books last night,” I told her as I sipped the peppermint iced tea she had in a glass pitcher in her refrigerator. I couldn’t remember the last time I had drunk tea, hot or cold. But just as I didn’t keep tea around my kitchen, she didn’t keep coffee in hers. This seemed very significant to me at the time, a further indication that there was no future between a pastor in the midst of a crisis of faith and a self-help writer with an apparent fixation on angels. “I enjoyed them,” I said.
“But…” She was smiling.
“But there’s a lot there about cherubs and seraphim. About luminescence and flashes of light.”
“And prayer. And meditation.”
“That, too.”
Her loft, as she had told me, was really not all that extravagant: high tin ceilings, the original fleur-de-lis tile, but not the basketball arena I had seen in my mind. A soft wood floor, wide pine that I suspected had probably been there for generations, covered in sections with plush Oriental rugs. A row of tall windows faced out uponGreene Street, each of them about half as large as the stained-glass windows of the church in Haverill, and there were four chandeliers dangling from the ceiling that initially left me confused and disturbed. I thought the bulbs of coiled glass were supposed to be the snakes that grew from Medusa’s skull. But then I realized I was mistaken: The tentacles, I saw when I looked more closely, were merely the arms and trumpets and small, delicate feet of angels. The glass was white as cooked rice. And on a solid-looking pedestal on one side of a bookcase, positioned against a wall so a visitor couldn’t help but feel he was being watched, was a carved bird the size of a preschooler. It was a bird of prey of some kind, an osprey perhaps, quite accurate, I thought, except that the wings—which were unfolded as if it were about to dive from a high perch—looked like they belonged on an angel. They ran parallel to the bird’s body and were arched at the top like a harp.
“The reality is that I probably view angels in much the same way that you do,” she said. “The fact you’ve come here suggests you don’t believe I’m a complete phony.” We were sitting on an elegant wrought-iron daybed with black bolsters. It was adjacent to the wall with the windows, near a row of hulking stainless-steel kitchen appliances: The refrigerator doors alone looked wide enough to be the entrance to a walk-in closet. There was another corner of the loft with a regular couch, a mirrored coffee table, and a pair of reupholstered easy chairs without arms that looked as if they were from the 1950s. She slept on a bed in an alcove ledge high above the corner in which—based on the desk and computer—she wrote. Along the wall opposite all those windows, broken only by the entryway, was a long line of modern wardrobe doors: the critical renovation she had made, she would tell me later, because the loft was wholly bereft of closets. I counted five wardrobes on each side of the entryway. And scattered along the walls that had neither windows nor wardrobes were framed dust jackets of her books beside specific bestseller lists, as well as a halfdozen prints of angels: grown-up angels, I was happy to see, not pudgy child ones with naked ham hocks for thighs. There was a small painting of an angel in a copse of cedar trees that looked a bit like a Botticelli, but she had assured me that it was the work of a minor painter from Siena and it was barely two hundred years old.
“I don’t believe you’re a phony at all,” I said.
“A bit loopy, maybe,” she suggested. “But not phony.”
“You’re putting words in my mouth,” I insisted. “Just last Sunday a fellow in my church who is
“I READ SOME of your books last night,” I told her as I sipped the peppermint iced tea she had in a glass pitcher in her refrigerator. I couldn’t remember the last time I had drunk tea, hot or cold. But just as I didn’t keep tea around my kitchen, she didn’t keep coffee in hers. This seemed very significant to me at the time, a further indication that there was no future between a pastor in the midst of a crisis of faith and a self-help writer with an apparent fixation on angels. “I enjoyed them,” I said.
“But…” She was smiling.
“But there’s a lot there about cherubs and seraphim. About luminescence and flashes of light.”
“And prayer. And meditation.”
“That, too.”
Her loft, as she had told me, was really not all that extravagant: high tin ceilings, the original fleur-de-lis tile, but not the basketball arena I had seen in my mind. A soft wood floor, wide pine that I suspected had probably been there for generations, covered in sections with plush Oriental rugs. A row of tall windows faced out uponGreene Street, each of them about half as large as the stained-glass windows of the church in Haverill, and there were four chandeliers dangling from the ceiling that initially left me confused and disturbed. I thought the bulbs of coiled glass were supposed to be the snakes that grew from Medusa’s skull. But then I realized I was mistaken: The tentacles, I saw when I looked more closely, were merely the arms and trumpets and small, delicate feet of angels. The glass was white as cooked rice. And on a solid-looking pedestal on one side of a bookcase, positioned against a wall so a visitor couldn’t help but feel he was being watched, was a carved bird the size of a preschooler. It was a bird of prey of some kind, an osprey perhaps, quite accurate, I thought, except that the wings—which were unfolded as if it were about to dive from a high perch—looked like they belonged on an angel. They ran parallel to the bird’s body and were arched at the top like a harp.
“The reality is that I probably view angels in much the same way that you do,” she said. “The fact you’ve come here suggests you don’t believe I’m a complete phony.” We were sitting on an elegant wrought-iron daybed with black bolsters. It was adjacent to the wall with the windows, near a row of hulking stainless-steel kitchen appliances: The refrigerator doors alone looked wide enough to be the entrance to a walk-in closet. There was another corner of the loft with a regular couch, a mirrored coffee table, and a pair of reupholstered easy chairs without arms that looked as if they were from the 1950s. She slept on a bed in an alcove ledge high above the corner in which—based on the desk and computer—she wrote. Along the wall opposite all those windows, broken only by the entryway, was a long line of modern wardrobe doors: the critical renovation she had made, she would tell me later, because the loft was wholly bereft of closets. I counted five wardrobes on each side of the entryway. And scattered along the walls that had neither windows nor wardrobes were framed dust jackets of her books beside specific bestseller lists, as well as a halfdozen prints of angels: grown-up angels, I was happy to see, not pudgy child ones with naked ham hocks for thighs. There was a small painting of an angel in a copse of cedar trees that looked a bit like a Botticelli, but she had assured me that it was the work of a minor painter from Siena and it was barely two hundred years old.
“I don’t believe you’re a phony at all,” I said.
“A bit loopy, maybe,” she suggested. “But not phony.”
“You’re putting words in my mouth,” I insisted. “Just last Sunday a fellow in my church who is
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