A Patent Lie by Paul Goldstein

“I'm just setting a fire.” She struck a kitchen match against the stone, put it to the newspaper crumpled beneath the logs, and replaced the screen. The tinder flared behind her and, rising, she momentarily lost her balance. Seeley steadied her with the hand he had extended in greeting.
    Leonard gave Renata an unhappy glance. He said, “I'll get the champagne.”
    Seeley took a chair close to the fire and Renata sank into the has-sock beside it, drawing her knees up and positioning herself so she could watch both Seeley and the flames. Fair and fine-boned, with a mass of dark hair that fell to just below her shoulders, she was more glamorous than in the photos. Yet, even this close, Seeley had no memory of her as the bride on tiptoe with an urgent message.
    She gave Seeley an amused, quizzical look and he wondered if she, too, was thinking of the whispered words.
    “Time flies,” she said, not inviting a reply. She seemed to be comfortable just sitting there, watching him and the fire.
    A painting crowded with nude figures hung on the wall above the fireplace. The figures were clustered in groups of two and three and, although the faces were indistinct, the painter had artfully used the bodies to convey emotions of sadness, joy, repose. It was far from the bold abstract expressionism that Seeley liked, but there was a sensual quality in the painting that intrigued him.
    Renata said, “With all the glass, there aren't many places to hang paintings.”
    “Who's the artist?”
    “Do you like it?”
    The way she asked told Seeley that the painting was hers. “Very much.” The words surprised him.
    “I stopped a few years ago. Orthopedic surgery doesn't leave much time for painting.”
    Seeley had thought she was a nurse.
    She must have seen his confusion. “I was still a nurse when I met you.” She gave him a crooked smile. “That's what a girl did in those days if her father was a doctor and her mother was a housewife. I met Leonard at a med-school mixer at Stanford. There weren't enough women, so they brought in nurses. We discovered we were the only ones there from upstate New York. In California, that's enough of a reason for two people to get together.”
    “You're from Buffalo?”
    She shifted on the hassock to see him better and tugged at her skirt, where it had ridden above her knees. “Schenectady.”
    “Like Daisy Miller.”
    “You don't look like a Henry James fan.”
    “I'm not,” Seeley said. “I read it in a college lit class. What would a Henry James fan look like?”
    “I don't know. Thin, neurotic. Maybe pale and bloated. Anyway, not like you ”
    In the kitchen a cork popped.
    Even before he stopped drinking, wine was at the very bottom of Seeley's choices. He didn't mind the taste as much as he did the inefficiency, the whole bottles he had to consume just to come within striking distance of the oblivion that three or four quick tumblers of gin could deliver in far less time. It was more than a year since he'd had a drink; Buffalo's enveloping familiarity had cosseted him well. Sometimes he went whole weeks without thinking about alcohol. Other times he could think of nothing else. The smallest mishap could set off the craving. He successfully navigated a long and difficult disbarment proceeding that threatened to finish off what was left of his career without once having the urge to drink. But, a week later, a shoelace broke and all he could think of was alcohol. A sound, like ice being scooped into a glass, could set off the craving. Or a cork popping.
    From the doorway Leonard gestured at the painting with the open champagne bottle. “It's good, isn't it?” He set the glasses on the coffee table, filled them, and handed them around, touching his glass to Seeley's—“A toast to Mike on his first visit to our home”—and then to Renata's. Renata tipped hers in Seeley's direction.
    Leonard sipped at the champagne, his eyes on Renata.
    Renata drained her glass and said to Seeley,