I sat on the 18 -inch cement ledge that jutted out from the museum wall at the South entrance and looked at the fountain in front of me. It boasts 60 spouts, with a 6 -foot geyser of foaming water coming from each one. It is a big, oval- shaped fountain with a lip wide enough that sometimes you see young boys rollerblading around it, though they usually wipe out. Sometimes a particularly streamlined cyclist will attempt the circuit and jump off just as the curve tightens at either end.

Noontime. And even though fall was approaching, the sun was strong enough that I could sit out with only a sweater over my sleeveless dress, leftover from the summer. It wasn’t my lunch hour for I take that at 2:00 o’clock, a necessary defense against the long afternoons. At 12, I habitually take a break. Not that I must work that hard, for I am essentially a clerk, and my job is answering the phone and booking group visits to the museum. But it is a tedious occupation and to me that is grueling enough. I had just been locked, in contemplation, in a stall in the staff bathroom when my eyes had happened on a thick piece of long black thread on the floor ahead of me, a bit to the right, yet not quite in the territory of the next booth. The thread was perfectly shaped with the contours of the head and arms of a woman, with a subtle waved hair and one arm extending to clasp the elbow of the other and the face long and Modigliani- like. It got me thinking about how the world looked different to me since I had given up drawing and therefore rarely bothered to congeal the space around me into form and shape as I used to; a process that was troubling and bothersome at times from which I was never at rest, but which also gave me a purpose and an object to all the endless space and time that seemed to engulf me.

What a long time ago it seemed that I had transferred anything that happened in my life onto the blank porous sheets of my drawing pad!

My thoughts were drawn to this as I sat on the ledge about 20 feet in front of the fountain, the left heel of my suede pumps stuck in the crevice of the lower shelf I rested it on. I reminded myself that if I were to suddenly jump off the ledge, the shoe would stick and I would trip, making a fool of myself in front of the other employees who were also sitting on the ledge eating their lunches, the smells of the cafeteria tuna, chicken and egg salads and occasional bologna wafting over at me on the limb of a subtle breeze, that also stirred up a flock of parched leaves in front of me.

Just then I happened to notice in my peripheral vision the approach from the main steps, which were to the north of me, of another employee who was bound to stop in front of me and question me about something which I had yet failed to do, concerning a group that was trying to book a gallery tour of a space that was undergoing renovation. I couldn’t remember who they were or what I did with them. But they were supposed to be dealt with inter-departmentally (her desk) since she was the person entrusted with such exceptions. I quickly got up and went through the 81st St. entrance into the museum, the guard clicking me in as usual on his counter, even though he knew (and knew that I knew he knew) I was an employee and not a member of the public, a subtle trickery done to enhance the attendance figures.

I knew I would have to fess up to the thing eventually, but just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it then. I returned to my office, to the counter that held my blotter and mess of papers, pens, Pez’s, eraser shavings, telephone, empty Tic Tac containers, bottles of Poland Spring, boxes of staples, clips and rubber bands, a croton with only a couple of viable leaves left and a small compatible. I shared computer space with three other employees, two of whom, short haired and bent necked were eating from smelly bowls of soup. I ignored them as usual.  

I wasn’t sure how this started, who started ignoring each other first but it frequently seems the case with people who deal with large numbers of the public. There is little energy left for small talk among us and this, in any case, is something we kindly spare each other. I noticed that my voicemail light was off, and this was a mixed blessing: No work calls to return but no personal calls I might have wanted, my mother for instance. Well, she was tired of me. I’d worn her out with the dissolution of my last relationship, too many calls, too many obsessive chewings over of the debris. Now when we spoke it was because I called her and 10 minutes into the conversation, she invariably told me she had to use the John. The phone rang and I picked it up hoping it was her, but it was a business call, a senior citizen group that wanted to visit the 20th Century Galleries. I had to enter the system, only one group was allowed in the Gallery every 15 minutes. A tedious process and the voice on the phone gruff and impatient. I considered lying to them and saying we were completely booked but all that would do is spawn further phone calls, the involvement of my superiors and a remonstration that would do me no good at this point in a career which had hit a cul-de-sac five years ago.

After I had dealt with the phone call, I decided to go back outside. By now my interceptor would have passed and I hadn’t gotten my full break of 20 minutes. The feel of the sun baking my cheeks, after sitting in my cold and airless office would be a welcome answer to the unanswerable stretch of the early afternoon.

I found the same spot on the ledge, far enough from the other sitters so that my presence wouldn’t seem to invite conversation but close enough to discourage another person from squeezing in between us. I looked at the fountain and in its bursting eruptions attempted to lose myself, the outline of who I was and what I was thinking. Here I could speak out my thoughts and they could disintegrate into the roar of the water but more than that, I considered it an obligation on my part, to crash my thoughts against the vertigreed pipes that stood under the throbbing Hyatts of foam.

“Let’s smash yourselves against the rocks”. This was the bid I made to my last lover who was trying to slow us down, who thought we should get to know each other before we got too involved. Not my style to slow down, I had to play the thing out fast, so that at the end there was a clear, cruel break rather than a slow diminishing. I had raised the stakes again, so had lost another one. Lost big and lost count.

It wasn’t always my fault. I told myself that. But I had fallen into the habit of using the next lover to get over the last one, and so I hadn’t had the time between the progression of man to man, argument to argument, insult to insult and then from passion to obsession to depression to draw or to take the time to take stock of my life. My mother called me the “master of the ricochet”. But that was some time ago when she still took an interest in my life.

Before I wore her out.

I tried to remember when I got into this pattern, but it seemed to come from so long ago that it was impossible to recall the kind of person I was before the endless shuffle from affair to affair. The strings of relationships were like continuous cloud banks, blocking out the sun. For years I hadn’t had a free thought, that wasn’t in some way mystified by rebound. I wondered what it would have been like instead if I had explored the terrain of my drawings, instead of attempting to navigate the turbulent waters of these doomed romances. But it was a thought that hurt too much to retain for long in my brain.

Yet, as people will do after shipwrecked affair, thoughts of its niceties drifted back to me. Now safely in perspective I was free to experience the depth of feeling I’d had for my last lover, the wound of that breakup still so fresh that I couldn’t think of his name without trembling, or the salty taste of him, the swollen lip he would give me from the pressure of his kisses, his predilection for having his nipples sucked, all gone now, waiting to be cataloged, put in its place with the one who liked to chew my earlobes and the one who had shredded bits of tissue paper adhering to his underarm hair, and the one who liked to wash my hair. Others, whose traits I could not remember, their pictures, poems, letters, faxes, e-mails put in a bamboo trunk in the bedroom closet, padlocked, so I wouldn’t torture myself by looking at them. I’d wanted their heads on my wall but in one case I got a painting and in another a framed photograph. It was most interesting to go with the ones who had talent for they would leave me something. But it was the hardest to lose the ones whose laughter I had shared, for I would hear its cadences in my sleep.

I stared at the fountain, not that I could really lose myself in it. I wondered how I would have attempted to draw it, if I still had the impulse to do that. I saw it with haloes now, the people who passed behind it lending a kind of blurry color, the Labradors they invited to drink from its filthy bed or swim. How might I have drawn those dogs if I hadn’t lost the faculty? Was it so much harder to draw than it was to love?

Just then a movement interrupted the line of my vision. I refocused on a very large orange and black butterfly which had settled on the paved ground between me and the fountain, rapidly fluttering its wings. Rare that I saw one so close and it was remarkably beautiful, the body long, resembling black felt and I was astonished at the delicate corrugations in the erect wings, which flashed over and over. Impossible to know whether it was injured or had just lost sight of the park, which was three blocks below us.

Just then I happened to look to the right of it and saw that a man in white shirt sleeves and tan slacks was watching me from the right side of the fountain. Perhaps he had noticed the butterfly too and had noticed me noticing it? I did not acknowledge him in any other way for I knew he knew I had seen him.

I went back to studying the butterfly.

I wondered how Nabokov could have spent a good part of his life killing them for study and I imagine that it would have to be a complex and perverse mindset which would allow the appreciation of beauty to result from its capture and murder. I thought about all this but not in a really serious way, in fact my thoughts had no real connection. It was much the same in the evenings now when I went from bath to bed and then got up again to look for something to eat and couldn’t recall what I had thought during those separate enterprises, or if I had even been asleep or awake. It was as if some other person were just moving me around. I wondered if the only thing that netted my thoughts together was the familiar ruminations over the breakups of my relationship and without that, if there was just nothing there.

I looked up again and noticed the man, who had been leaning forward with a foot up on the ledge of the fountain, no doubt getting wet, had moved a little closer, he was positioned now at its near side, his eyes on the butterfly. I tried to determine his age, somewhere in his 40s? He lifted his head and our eyes briefly met. His face had that blandness that could be any age since his cheeks were smooth and overfed and his lips were full, though pale. I looked back at the butterfly, whose wings were now arched down so that they formed a tent over its body. With the air in front of me, which seemed to be made-up of visible ions, I attempted to sketch it, first just the body, which I formed into a transparent tadpole shape and then the wings, which I bestowed like a crown near the head. It was a large, colorless ghost butterfly that I had created, strangely disfigured and I was glad to let the breeze scatter its elements.

Just then a group of high schoolers, most of them tall and attired in flannel shirts and low riding jeans, exited the 81st St. door of the museum. The man and I simultaneously came to attention as we realized that their apparent destination, the main steps of the Museum to the north of us, took them directly in the path of the butterfly, still claiming its spot on the pavement, smack between the museum wall and the fountain. I was able to stand up, checking to see if once again I needed to unfasten my heel, but I noticed that one boy, who was maybe 15 and at the head of the advancing line suddenly stopped and noticing the butterfly about a foot ahead of him, signaled the others behind him to halt.

Here it comes, I thought. I felt the rise of panic in my throat. Was I going to have to do something?

My life of the past few years suddenly passed in front of my eyes. It seemed to have brought me to this point, this early afternoon in September, staring at a beautiful thing that was about to be trampled. I realized then what it was all about. You took the raw form that was in the universe and created out of that a destiny. Instead of creating beautiful things with my hands, I had chosen to ruin them for the sake of my heart. Yet I was going to be judged all the same. If it all inevitably came down to action, then I would certainly have to do something now, for the sake of the butterfly as well as for myself.

I looked up at the man who had moved so close he was only across the line of students from me. It was clear from his expression that he was prepared to intercede.

The boy stood for several seconds staring at the trembling butterfly on the pavement in front of him. My mouth had gone dry. I had an acute impression of what he looked like though I saw him only in profile, his mouth half open, his short hair unevenly fringed above his narrow forehead, his flushed cheek.

“We better move it over” he said.

He bent down and gently taking the wings between his fingertips picked up the now still insect and walking as if on eggshells, crossed over to the fountain and set it down on a dry piece of ledge at its north end. Then returning to his classmates, urged them back toward the steps.

In surprise and great relief, I found myself seeking out the eyes of the man as the group of students separating us quickly diminished. He smiled at me and turned to look at the butterfly in its new location. Not the best position since the spray from the fountain, though lighter there, would dampen it. However, it suddenly took off. We watched it flash brightly, creating a small blurry rainbow of colors through the mist produced by the fountain, make a semi-circle and disappear into the shadow of trees lining the south side of the museum, possibly enroute to the thicker greenery of the park.

With the object gone, I felt suddenly self-conscious and ignoring the man, looked down at my dress which seemed to have twisted itself so that the hemline was hiked above my knees. I straightened it and reaching further down, brushed the suede on my pumps in the opposite direction for no other reason than that they looked newer that way. When I looked up, the man was in front of me.

“Here”. He handed me a torn-off sheet of loose-leaf paper and walked away in the direction of the butterfly and away from the museum. I watched him and satisfied that he wasn’t going to turn around suddenly, examined the sheet of paper. In big clumsy print it read: GENE: call me! And a number with a 718 prefix. I tried to remember what he looked like. If he were viable or merely plausible, my usual categories. The viables were the ones I wanted, the plausible the ones who merely wanted me and the categories rarely met. Thinking back, I decided that his age and the roundness of his head put him only in the plausible category and resolved to throw the paper away as soon as I passed the trash bin.

But when I got home that evening, I found that I still had it on me.

– Pia Quintano