The Cloisters, page 6
“Looking for Leo?” said Rachel, taking a drag on her cigarette. The heat of the morning had given way to a cloudy afternoon, rain threatened on the other side of the river, and we were taking advantage of the cooler air by sitting at the edge of the Bonnefont Cloister, Rachel holding her hand over the ramparts so no one would notice her smoking.
“Not really,” I said, although it was a lie. I’d been looking for him all day, even going so far as to linger in the kitchen, the gardens, around the staff bathrooms, hoping he might walk by.
“You’re a terrible liar,” said Rachel, watching my profile as she stubbed out her cigarette. “On Monday he usually works in the garden shed, not out in the cloisters. Not that you care.”
She took in the scene: visitors reverently wandering the brick paths of the garden, their hands clasped behind their backs. I imagined it might have been the same five hundred years earlier.
“Thank god the heat broke,” she said. Not that Rachel looked touched by the heat or the humidity.
“I came in early,” I said. “I couldn’t stand it. But when I got to the library this morning, there were wax drippings on the tables. Or at least I thought it was wax. What do you think could have caused that?”
Rachel looked out over the ramparts, toward the river. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Do you think someone would light candles in the library?”
“Maybe there was a donor function over the weekend. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve found in the library—even the galleries—after one of those.”
It seemed plausible. And it wasn’t like there was much communication between the Events department and Curatorial at the museum. “It was just strange. Why would anyone bring candles into a room full of rare books?”
“Monks used to do it all the time,” said Rachel, getting to her feet.
The day moved quickly after that, but despite the bruised sky, the city never received anything but humidity and stillness. I was sad to leave the library at six, its cool stony confines having quickly become more familiar than my studio; the beauty of my daytime surroundings somehow made the reality of my nights all the worse.
As I walked through the galleries and under the lofty vaults of the hallways on my way to the shuttle, my mind drifted to the heat. I hadn’t been prepared for it, for the wetness. And I began to wonder if I had enough money for a new window unit; there was a hardware store two blocks from my apartment. But as I started to do the math of cool air against the realities of my budget, I realized the margins were so slim, I needed to be sure. I moved to open the calculator on my phone, only to realize I had left it on the chair in the library. It was a quick walk back, but on my way around the Bonnefont Cloister, I saw the two of them—Rachel and Leo—standing by the arch that led to the garden shed, deep in conversation. Rachel leaned against the wall, her arms pinned behind her back, Leo’s hand positioned above her head.
Without thinking, I paused behind one of the columns and watched from across the garden. I could hear her laughter as she shook out a cigarette, lit it, and held it out to him. He didn’t take it from her, but slowly lifted her hand to his mouth, where he took a drag. Annoyed, Rachel wrested her hand free and slid off the wall, leaving Leo alone.
I took the opportunity to duck into the library, unseen. It took me a few minutes to locate my phone, difficult as it was to focus through the mix of jealousy and desire that made my palms ache. Phone in hand, I went to lean my weight against the wooden doors of the library when I heard Patrick’s voice coming from the other side.
“I think it’s time to bring Ann in.”
“It’s too soon, Patrick,” responded Rachel.
“She’s here to be an asset.”
Patrick had lowered his voice, which required me to lean my whole body against the door, my ear to the seam. When Rachel spoke again, I could sense the frustration in her voice through the thick, damp wood:
“We don’t know that we can trust her yet. Although she’s already curious. You know she found the wax? Did she ask you about it?”
“I took care of it.”
Then silence, save for the sound of my pulse beating through my ears.
“Come on,” said Patrick, his voice in a soft tone I hadn’t heard before. “Let’s not fight about this. You wanted her.”
“I think she can help,” Rachel conceded, and I sensed that this conversation was not only about the exhibition but something more, something I couldn’t yet see.
“Sometimes we have to take risks,” Patrick insisted.
Then a beat.
“Don’t you trust me,” he said.
Rachel must have nodded because he added:
“That’s my girl. You know I don’t think she ended up here by chance, right?”
The handle of the door began to turn, and I hurried to the end of the library, then slipped into the stacks before it had a chance to open. I made my way through the staff hallway, past the kitchen. My head down in the poorly lit hallway, I nearly made it to the lobby before I ran, literally, headlong, into Leo.
“You okay?” he asked, holding my shoulders and looking me up and down.
“Yes. Sorry. I’m—” I was too flustered, too out of breath from hurrying to focus on the words I wanted to say.
“Slow down, Ann. It’s a museum. No one’s saving lives here.”
“Right. I know.” I exhaled. “I was just trying to make the shuttle.”
“It just left,” he said, taking a step back.
“Shit.”
“Why don’t we walk?” He motioned for me to go ahead of him. The way his arm moved reminded me of the way he had stretched it above Rachel’s head—the strength of it, the possessiveness. I wanted to feel it above me, wrapped around my waist, my shoulders, hard and tight.
We traded the darkness of the museum for the canopy of the park, where the winding paths crossed the grassy expanses with dizzying rhythm. Leo walked next to me, occasionally humming a few bars of a song I didn’t recognize.
After we passed a group of children being led hand in hand like a tiny toddler daisy chain, he turned to me and said, without preamble, “Why are you here?”
“What kind of question is that?” It was sharp, his question. And it reminded me, as if I didn’t already know, that I was new and inexperienced, even unwanted.
There was some part of me that knew it would be best to ignore the things I had seen and heard that day, to build a barrier between myself and Leo and Rachel and Patrick. Between the world of the museum and the things I needed it to accomplish—an acceptance to grad school, a life outside Walla Walla. Contained in Leo’s question was an implication that had begun to worry me, too: Why are you meddling in our world?
I must have been quiet for a moment too long because he added, more gently, “I mean, why not Los Angeles or Chicago or Seattle? Why here?”
I gestured around us, relieved. “I hear it’s the greatest city in the world.”
Leo laughed. “Give it time.”
The last, trailing child trotted by us, dragging their free hand through the knee-high grass.
“It’s the art, I guess,” I said, looking up at his profile. Although I kept the other reasons to myself: it was thousands of miles from the Lutheran church where my father was buried, it was a city that never faulted you for your ambition, even if others might. We walked side by side, Leo’s hands deep in his pockets, a shoulder bag across his chest. “It’s the only place I can do the work I want to do,” I settled on.
“What are you willing to give up for the work?”
There was an edge to the question, and I pushed my hands into my own pockets and shrugged, not ready to let him know more when I still knew so little about him.
Leo bumped his shoulder against mine. “Not everyone is sensitive around here,” he said. “You shouldn’t take questions so personally. And if you do, and don’t want to answer them, just tell people to fuck off. I’m just trying to figure out if you’ll like it here. Most people here don’t care if you do, by the way. So long as you do the job. But I like it. I like the gardening, at least. The work, like you said. Even if I hate the visitors. Sometimes, on the quiet days, I can pretend it’s the way it was meant to be. Pre–tourist-industrial complex. Pre–experience economy.”
“To me, The Cloisters always feels a little that way. A world apart.”
We had reached the subway station, its entrance built into a rock outcropping, ivy cascading down its flanks. It looked like a station that belonged in Rome, not the northern tip of Manhattan.
“This is your stop,” he said, nodding at the stairs.
“Thanks for walking with me,” I said, embarrassed by how juvenile it sounded, as if he had held my hand like the children we had passed.
“I like walking with you, Ann Stilwell.” He hesitated. “It’s an incredible place—the city, The Cloisters. Just don’t let it wear you down. Make it sharpen you instead.”
* * *
The next day, a constant patter of rain tapped out its rhythm on the glass windows of the library where Rachel and I worked. The speed with which she managed to consume texts still astonished me, her reading quick and incisive. When the rain finally stopped, Rachel stood and excused herself from the table, knocking on Patrick’s door. For almost an hour I watched the door out of the corner of my eye, pushing down the thought that, if five more minutes ticked by, I might have time to get closer, perhaps catch a word or two of the conversation unfolding inside. But just when I was about to peruse the shelves closest to his office, Rachel reemerged, holding the door behind her until it closed with only a whisper.
“Patrick wants to know if you would come to dinner at his house on Friday,” she said, sitting down across from me.
I couldn’t help but think about what I had heard through the library door the day before, but if there was a thread of resignation in Rachel’s words now, I couldn’t parse it.
At Whitman, I had never been invited to a faculty house for dinner. Even though the school was small, a division between students and staff persisted. Such dinners, after all, were fodder for speculating about inappropriate relationships. But I had been curious about Patrick’s house since Rachel had first mentioned it, and the invitation felt like the initiation I had been waiting for.
“It’s a tradition,” she continued. “I usually go up once a week. Sometimes there are other guests. More like an intellectual salon. This week it’s going to be Aruna Mehta, the curator of rare manuscripts at the Beinecke Library.”
“I don’t know how to get to Tarrytown,” I said, beginning to worry about the logistics of arriving in a presentable way, not damp from walking or riding an airless Metro-North.
“We can drive together,” Rachel said, holding up a hand. “I’ll pick you up at five.”
CHAPTER SIX
On Friday, Rachel picked me up in a black town car, her driver at the wheel.
“I brought you a few things,” she said, holding out an oversized, stuffed lilac bag. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s clothes.”
“You bought me new clothes?” I said, pulling a skirt from the bag, its tags still attached.
“No. Of course not. I was cleaning out my closet and thought you might be interested in some of these things. I never wore a lot of them. I was going to donate it.”
The way she said it, off the cuff, made me think there was nothing more to it than that, but part of me wondered if she was tired of looking at my drab outfits every day, my sensible cotton/poly-blend life. I looked through a few of the pieces, feeling the fabric between my fingers. No wonder Rachel always looked incredible.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you want to change into something now—?”
It was a gentle prod, gentle enough that I didn’t feel an immediate sense of shame, but enough for me to look down at the slacks I had selected for the evening. Even the word—slacks—made my mistake clear.
“Would you mind?”
“Not at all. John, can you circle?” Rachel asked the driver, who replied in the affirmative. “I’ll come up with you.”
“No!” The thought of Rachel in my cramped studio, seeing my clothes pinned to the clothesline I’d run across the fire escape, just as my neighbors had done, the dirty dishes—her trying to squeeze onto the single square of my couch that was not covered with books and notes—made me dizzy with panic. “I mean, I’ll be super quick. There’s no need.”
“There’s a black dress in there that would be perfect. Just a simple shift. That’s what I would wear.”
As I pawed through the bag upstairs, I was glad Rachel wasn’t there, taking in the single room that made up my sublet. To make it look more like home, I had mounted a framed photograph of my parents, as well as a few postcards of paintings I’d never seen in real life, but which had occupied the bulk of my time and effort at Whitman: a suite of frescos from the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. The name Schifanoia, derived from the phrase schivar la noia, or, to escape boredom. A pleasure palace on the outskirts of Ferrara where Borso d’Este, the eccentric ruler of an influential duchy, had an entire banquet hall painted with scenes from the zodiac. There was a procession of Venus being drawn on a carriage by swans. Beneath her, a resplendent Taurus, a tan-colored bull whose flanks were dotted with gold stars, blessed her passage. Borso had designed the hall to impress his guests—astrology as a performance of power, as a totem of good fortune. But some scholars had argued it ran more deeply than that, that Borso and the Renaissance astrologers who had designed the room believed paintings of celestial bodies could have as much impact on an individual’s fate as the actual stars above. As if the drawn image of Leo could affect the viewer’s—or in this case, Borso’s—horoscope in felicitous ways. Art at its most powerful, perhaps. It was an argument that Lingraf had always encouraged me to take seriously.
I changed into the black shift and pulled my curly hair into a low pony, using the newly arrived box from my mother as a footstool so I could gain enough vantage to see more of my body in the small mirror in the bathroom. The difference was striking: my hair slightly romantic in its chaos, the neckline drooped just enough to look sexy, while the silhouette itself was loose and comfortable, falling at just the right place on my thighs so that it was still appropriate for a salon—the first I’d ever been invited to. Rachel couldn’t have worn it more than once, maybe twice; it had the feel of something that had never been laundered. I resisted the urge to go through the rest of the bag and see what other castoffs Rachel had gifted me. Instead, I ran back down the stairs. I didn’t want her to wait.
“Oh, I knew that would be perfect,” she said when I slid into the car next to her. The compliment felt as natural as the fabric of the dress on my skin.
We drove north, or rather inched, along the crowded parkway, Rachel tapping out something on her phone, me watching the high-rises slowly give way to the leafy exits of the exurbs, until the driver hugged the curve of an exit, and then the easy back-and-forth of quieter streets. Rachel said nothing through it all, and I, not wanting to appear too eager, too desperate, kept quiet. Finally, as we pulled up a long gravel driveway, Rachel slipped her phone back into her bag and said, “We’re here.”
The house came into view—an orderly collection of gray flagstones and leaded glass windows, separated by crosshatched metal into a tiny patchwork of frames. The circular driveway was flanked by balsam firs and beech trees; the front door, a Gothic arch framed by manicured boxwood. In so many ways, it reminded me of The Cloisters—the color of the stone, the faux-Gothic aesthetic, the way the driveway built anticipation, teasing the driver with the slow reveal of a stone chimney here, an aged copper weathervane there. I wondered if John would wait for us the entire time, just sitting in the car, a sandwich packed away in the trunk, like he did every week.
No one met us at the door. Rachel simply let herself into the oval foyer, anchored by a stone staircase. To our left was the library, and as Rachel led me through, I did my best to commit the details to memory. It was my first glimpse inside an academic home: there were framed manuscript pages and an encaustic triptych on display, a table covered with oddly shaped white dice, shelves filled with leather-bound books. It was a richly and carefully curated collection, one that extended well beyond Patrick’s salary at The Cloisters, I was sure. I wanted to linger, to touch the thick fabric of the couches, feel the cool mahogany of the tables, but Rachel had already crossed the space, as if it were commonplace, and was waiting for me at a pair of French doors, thrown open onto the summer evening.
From the flagstone patio off the library, views stretched down to where the Tappan Zee bridged Rockland and Westchester Counties across the Hudson. The air was hazy and thick with the constant hum of insects. Beneath a striped awning, Patrick and a woman sat holding drinks sweaty from the humidity. Her small frame barely filled the chair, but her dress, a vibrant coral with woven gold accents, made her presence outsized. With only four attendees, it was too small a number to be considered a salon; it was more an intimate dinner party.
For whatever reason—likely our surroundings, the library, the glass windows oily with age—I expected someone to come take our drink order, so I was surprised to see Patrick get up and walk into a door at the far end of the patio—the kitchen, I would learn—and fix our drinks himself.
“Negronis,” he explained, handing me a heavy, etched crystal highball.
The woman sitting in the chair, I learned, was Aruna Mehta. Punjabi by way of Oxford. She and Patrick had been graduate students together—almost twenty years of friendship, she said. Aruna wore her glossy hair piled elegantly on her head, a pair of reading glasses around her neck. Rachel kissed her on both cheeks before sitting down. Even if it was a casual greeting, the intimacy of the gesture and Rachel’s confidence at executing it surprised me. No faculty had ever invited me to enjoy such familiarity.
“Your first time?” Aruna said to me, gesturing at the view.
“It is,” I said. “It’s incredible.”
