Only as they were trudging up more concrete steps did it occur to him that he should have asked her if she wanted to do something different. And yet when he looked at her smile that was so radiant from being linked to art and linking it to them he could tell that she would never find art museums boring let alone cloying the soul. He was the deferential gentleman, and his inveterately shy son tolerated the museums with little fidgetiness.
After they were inside for an hour she began to lean on him the way he liked women to do even though he had not let them do it for many years. But he detested how she was dressed. Like at the park, she was still wearing sunglasses and a hat that coaxed upon itself and draped down as if it had been thrown into the wash too many times. She would pull the glasses down to the tip of her nose when they came to a work of art, talk about it and what she knew about the artist (if anything), and then move them up her nose. He did not understand this flagrant violation of femininity. It was as if she wanted to be as inconspicuous and stealth as a bag lady for fear of being mistaken for Michelangelo. He had avoided the subject in the taxi under the belief that she would remove them once they were in the building.
"What is all this?" he at last asked as he pulled on the brim of her hat.
"Oh," she interjected and acquiesced wordlessly as she smoothed out her hair. He was pleased. She was transforming from a sallow and destitute street person back to an image more suited to be loved. Within the machinations of self-centered man, each saw the other as an "opportunity" and each one contemplated and re-contemplated what that opportunity was in vain.
He wanted to move about and change visual images as if he were in front of the television with his remote control, but she wanted to stare for a few moments at these portals into the entity.
When they were outside again she put on her sunglasses so as to counter these feelings of "tenderness" which could misdirect her down a long and dark labyrinth of tight one-way back-alley actions leading further into her own obscurity and to prostate positions at a man-god's feet. For he was already becoming a bit of an extension of her own little life and a medium for more intense pleasures that she could not reach alone, and so she put on glasses that he disapproved of so that she would not lose herself to him even in the most miniscule way.
As with the brain that made deals and compromises to reconcile contradictory opinions within itself, she knew that a woman would need to be deferential in a relationship that was that extension of herself. She told herself that she would try to be as little accommodating as possible. She smiled as if ready to laugh for the two of them at this stage were nothing. They were merely accidental traveling companions. She thought that even if they did become involved with each other the myopic perspective of a personal life and love might be nothing in reality but attempts at cell replication in this organ of the Earth in this organism of the universe. Such was the human predicament of not knowing anything of reality but one's own caprices. Her levity was transient. She became serious.
"Why do you wear those things?" He smiled. His tone was more bantering than condemning. If it had been altogether condemning she in her moody caprice would have walked away proudly, severing him without saying a word in that behavior typical to those whose youth had been besieged in the worst of ridicule.
"I don't know. Sometimes I want to be different. Sometimes the glare of the sun gives me a headache."
"You aren't feeling sick now, are you?"