Travels in Vermeer by Michael White Page A

thing—a little skeptically, with my counselor Tracy’s gentle coaxing. When I sign up, I’m prompted for a username, and draw a blank, and because I don’t really care, I take one of the silly suggestions: “Ariesguy24.” (Thereafter, for months, I field numerous questions about the personal significance of this tag. Am I twenty-four? Believe in astrology? No and no.) I begin winnowing pages of ads, the flattering snapshots of smiling, cup-half-full women sitting at bars, proffering a toast—or leaning, windblown, against the rail of a sailboat or beach cottage—in fifteen or twenty minutes. (It’s really odd, I just want to say, how many women claim to love NASCAR, football, and Harleys.) There’s a giddy, kid-in-the-candystore feeling to all the winks and IM’s … but it fades pretty fast.
    I skim the ads when I come home from work—three heads to a row, six rows to a page—each night’s catch of faces. I set up coffees, lunches, beach walks. More than once I can’t recognize them when I see them (though the photos are all within the past year). Of course I smile, when I meet them, anyway.
    But then I begin to hone in on Anne, and we email back and forth all October, about teaching and inspiration and burnout. Her messages come very quickly and thoughtfully. I look at one particular snapshot of her often: she’s wearing jeans, standing in front of a blackboard. There’s another of her skydiving; another of her in a swimsuit, with dark, bobbed hair and a killer smile; another of an abstract, mostly purple acrylic painting of hers. She’s cut-to-the-chase, completely grown-up. Seems perfect.
    Therefore, I make a cross-state drive on a Friday afternoon, just after one of those drenching, late fall rains. I can’t shake a vaguely fugitive feeling as I circle the building, trying every locked door. At this point in my life, I’ve somehow not yet owned a cell phone. But I manage to blunder my way inside anyway, past the security system, up a delivery ramp. The dock is open because there’s a young couple moving in, unloading their sofa out of a U-Haul truck. I locate the service elevator, exit on the sixth floor, and there, at the end of the hall is the penthouse suite. When I knock, Anne says, “Come on in,” but by then, the door has already swung open. All at once, I’m standing in the middle of an enormous, luminous space, listening as she talks about the ongoing renovations, the adjoining restaurant, the nightclub, the gallery, as she puts on purple hoop earrings, adjusts the music, boils water for tea.
    â€œHow do you take it?” she says. I’m not picky.
    Finally, I get to look at her. Here is the killer smile in the flesh, the flawless, uniform teeth. She’s slim in her jeans, with bright green eyes and fine freckles. I love how she’s let her hair go peppery gray.
    The size of the room astounds, the height of the cathedral ceiling astounds, the abundance of clear north light astounds. I go to the casements, holding a cup I suspect she has glazed herself. I douse the teabag up and down, releasing its jasmine fragrance, and look across the still-wet suburbs—unawakened, blonde as straw—and into the scrubbed pale skies beyond. When I look down, I notice, next to my hand, the original, articulated, brass hand-crank that swings the window out—I wonder where the bolted-down pencil-sharpener could be. Also here, on the sill, stands a cut-glass pitcher, filled to the gills with a bouquet of bright purple pinwheels. “Ninety-nine cents apiece,” she says, from across the room. “I love Walmart.”
    She takes me up a stairway spilling down through the center of the apartment, and shows me the immaculate suite-within-a-suite where I’ll be staying the night, with its enormous, claw-foot tub. It’s a little odd to be spending the night on a first date, but this was her idea;