The Crane Gallery, a pristine glass box edged with brushed steel, sat at the base of an old factory on Prince Street, long renovated into over priced loft apartments, a short walk from the Vesuvio bakery. The massive building, with its soot-grained ornamentation -- a cast iron-stamped French Empire façade, the windows braced by Corinthian columns – looked like it was about to crush the little gallery at its base. The effect was awkward and unsettling, like balancing a bookshelf on a light bulb.

I stood outside for a minute or two, letting the late afternoon crowds jostle past me, checking out the work framed in the big window display: heavy polished stones piled into cairns, bracketed by screens showing a repeating loop of nighttime traffic – over-cranked ribbons of red and white light flickering over the piles of rock. An on-the-nose multi-media fossil fuel apocalypse: yawn. I felt a quick tug of disappointment as I pushed inside the gallery. I wanted Natalie Crane to be cool. And I was confused. What could this woman want with me? I didn’t make installations; I just put paint on canvas, dreary and un-hip. My idea of ‘multi-media’ was reading a magazine while I watched TV.

There were more pieces inside: a screen showing a stop sign as time lapse dawn-to-dusk light washed over it, the illumination spilling onto an unmarked gravestone set into the gallery floor; an eight-foot-high, walk-in cylinder that projected the driver’s point-of-view of a spinning car crash against the curve of it’s walls. On the circular floor space the artist had piled a jumble of cell-phone chargers, fifteen or twenty separate shapes with different plugs, tangled together, no phones, with a sound like migrating geese chirping and squawking in the background. That one was definitely my favorite. I stood staring through the vertical entry, letting the swirl of road and trees make me dizzy.

 I felt a hand on my arm. “Mr. Morris?”

It always took me a second to respond to that name. I would have made a lousy spy.

“Oh, right,” I said.

“Ms. Crane is ready for you. Can I take you back to the office?”

“Sure, right, of course.”

She lifted her chin towards the cylinder.

“It’s called ‘Inattention’.”

“Fascinating.”

“It’s quite a conversation piece.”

“Perfect for the DMV.”

Her smile turned sour. “If you take it literally.” I was dismissed: one more hopeless plebe. “Here we are,” she said, stopping at an incongruous wood-paneled door. It had probably been part of the original building.

“Thanks,” I said. But she was already turning away.

Inside, Natalie Crane perched behind a Lucite desk. One wall was brick, the other held a giant Rauschenberg canvas; the wall behind her held two giant, triple hung six-light windows that looked out on a trash-strewn alley: one more art installation for the literal minded.

“Hello, Robert, come in,” she said. She had a rough smokers’ voice, but I saw no sign of cigarettes anywhere, Maybe she’d quit. “You’re perfectly prompt and I think that is so important, so telling – a little slice of DNA that reveals the whole genome of a person’s character.”

“Yikes,” I said. Then it hit me. “Robert?”

“Well, of course, Darling. Let’s not be childish about this. You’re not in the Witness Protection Program. No angry mobsters to worry about.”

I released a breath. “Just my Dad.”

“The resemblance is striking.”

“So I’m told.”

“He’s a good looking man.”

“Better looking than me.”

She nodded “Have a son. It skips a generation.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

The room was quiet, apart from the old fashioned clanking of the big cast iron radiators, painted white like everything else. The room smelled faintly of new carpet, as if they had just renovated the place; that and a smell I recalled from my grandmother’s apartment: hairspray. Natalie Crane’s  steely do had the lacquered solidity of another era, when I was nine years old in a different century, watching Darkwing Duck and Animaniacs and  eating candy bar lunches on our ‘do as you like’ weekends.

I was all grown up now, though. But somehow it didn’t feel that way. More like, a kid caught playing dress-up in his father’s closet, complete with magic marker mustache.

I sat up straighter. “The name Raoul Morris means a lot to me.”

“Well of course it is. But I’m going to have to 1099 you on our sales and I doubt Raoul has his own Social Security number.”

That perked me up. “Our sales?”

She smiled, a thin predatory curve of the lip that widened her eyes with greedy delight. She was an irresistible little bird at that moment, some bizarre cross between Dorothy Parker and an African Gray Parrot. “Well that is the general idea, sweetie. I hang your work. People come and look at it. They take it away and give me money.  I give some of that money to you. You give some of that money to the government. And life goes on.”

“So … you want to show my work?”

She pushed back the leather and steel wire chair and skipped around the desk to stand over me. Even sitting, I came up to her chin. “Why beat around the bush?” she said. “Suspense is a terrible thing in daily life. I don’t even like it in books. I always read ahead -- isn’t that awful? What can I say? The fact is, you’re a God-send. I’d say you were the answer to my prayers, but I think asking someone as busy as God for particular little things is just very inappropriate. As if he doesn’t have enough on his mind! I’m organizing another universe, but I’ll take time out to find Natalie Crane another artist for her group show. It’s absurd. Still, this is like -- kismet. Life is all timing, don’t you think? I think so. Coincidence feels fake, accidents are a bore -- give me some good old fashioned intention any day. Schemes and conspiracies, that’s what makes life interesting. Of course I’ll have to see much more of your work. I want to pick and choose and I’m famously picky. I’m also quite choosy but I never get credit for that.”

“So, let me get this straight -- ”

“The show opens on the fifteenth of December. I don’t mean to rush you, sweetie, but we need everyone committed this week. I know -- it’s like trying to jump on a moving train. But it’s fun. At least the train is going somewhere. Unlike the Toonerville Trolley you’ve been riding.”

“Hey,” I said,  “At least it meets all the trains. And this is the proof.” She gave me a funny look. “My Dad collected the cartoons. Toonerville Folks? Skipper and Mr. Bang? Aunt Eppie Hogg? Fattest woman in three counties? No?”

She shook her head. “Well, you’re certainly full of surprises.”

”My misspent youth.”

“Toonertown Trolley. I have no idea why I even know that phrase – term, whatever it is. It’s just one of those bits and pieces you have kicking around in the back of your head. Very strange. Like – ‘crossing the rubicon.’ What does that mean, anyway?”

I actually knew, but it didn’t feel like the right move to start lecturing her on Julius Caesar, the Roman Imperium and the river-crossing that made his insurrection official.

“A point of no return?” I offered instead.

She smiled. “Well, that’s appropriate. Shall we do this?”

She was watching me intently, all business now.

I held up one hand. “It’s  --  I just want to make one thing clear. I have to be Raoul Morris.”

“You can call yourself  whatever you want, Robert.  All I care about is selling pictures.” She hovered over me. “You get my standard commission, fifty-fifty, checks cut within thirty days. Ties and jackets for the opening -- haircut and a shave, presentable girl on your arm, best behavior. I do the talking. Painters are strictly ornamental at the Crane Gallery.”

I looked up at her. I must have been grinning because she grinned back at me and stuck out her sinewy little arm, hung with bracelets, and let me shake her hand, studded with rings. Her nails were lavender, this afternoon, not pink; but her grip was still strong. I remembered those talons.

“Well? Do we have a deal?”

“Yes,” I said, “Yes we do.”

She released my hand with a shrug. “See how easy that was?”

“Well, it was fast, anyway.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “It’s always fast when it’s real, darling. That’s what unsuccessful people never understand.” I stood up and she pushed me toward the door. “Talk to Leslie. Pick a time when I can see the rest of your work. Good boy.  Now scoot, I have phone calls to make.”

I left the gallery in a daze, with too much to absorb. I thought of that wonderful de Saint Exupery picture  -- the boa-constrictor digesting an elephant.

It was an odd, unexpected feeling, like stepping off a non-stop flight to Australia, in a different hemisphere and a different season, sixteen hours behind. Tyler Bains calls it ‘get-lag’. “It’s just like jet lag,” he told me once. “You reset your watch, drink plenty of water and get a good night’s sleep. In the morning you believe everything.”

            Well, okay, but first things first: I had to tell Joanna. My new life, casually offered like a cup of tea off a tray, would never turn real without the ratification of her smile.

            It was a short walk to the restaurant, through the falling dusk. You taste the coming winter in the smudged chilly air, in the steam rising from the manhole covers, in the scurrying electric intensity of the hurrying crowds. The city seemed poised for something wonderful,  the night before the Giants’ Superbowl victory parade, but maybe it was just me, my own modest victory, maybe I’d finally gotten that elusive invitation after all and the party was just beginning.  I could feel it in the cracked sidewalks under my feet and the brightly-lit store fronts pocking the gloom and the grimy brick and cement of the old buildings rising around me like an embrace.

            Joanna broke out a bottle of champagne when I arrived and we shared it out among the con tractors and tradesmen working late in the narrow space, sitting at the stained but unvarnished bar elbows, on the rough oak grain,  toasting all the possibilities of Nee York. One of the electricians played in a rock band (They were going to be opening for the Mountain Goats in Toronto early next year); the tile guy had just published a story in Glimmer Train, “—and that never happens, dude.”  One of the assistant plumbers had just passed the test for his license: “That’s good enough for me.”

            “Success at last,” Joanna said, lifting her glass again. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

            “Only the champagne, “ I said. “And you.”

            A mock disgusted groan went up from the crew, and Bruno, the GC, punched me in the arm, tilting me sideways and spilling my drink. Joanna poured me some more; we killed the bottle and opened a new one.

Later, we went home and made love and I went to sleep near dawn, thinking that after living in the city for most of my life I was finally a part of it. I had finally arrived, an immigrant from the shtetls of failure, with citizenship clutched in my hand like my great grandfathers naturalization diploma, in full possession of the American Dream.

            What can I say?

            Some people never learn .