The Cloisters(19)

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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.