The Cloisters(39)

“You liked it, didn’t you? The show?”

I murmured in agreement.

“I knew you would. There’s something a little punk about you, Ann. Even if I’m not even sure you know it yourself. But I like it. It reminds me of myself.”

I let my body lean back against his, until his cheek brushed the nape of my neck and he whispered, “I have something for you.”

“What is it?” I said, spinning around. Our bodies were so close I had to tilt my face up to see what he held above me: a battered deck of cards.

“Mia’s tarot,” he said. “Here, pull a card.”

I frowned. “That’s not how you’re supposed to do it.”

But he held it up, the top card already partially pulled out. I snatched it from him and held it to my chest.

“What is it?” he asked, a smile on his lips.

I peeked down and peeled it away from my chest, the card damp with sweat after only a second against my skin. The Lovers. When I looked up at him, he was laughing. Leo leaned in and whispered against my ear: “I like telling your fortune.”



* * *



I woke up the next morning in the Bronx to a paper cup of coffee and a bagel on the bedside table. Leo’s apartment was shared with the drummer—who was actually an aspiring mixed-media artist from Brown. By the time I peeked my head out of Leo’s bedroom, the drummer had already gone for the day, and Leo was bent over the kitchen table, scribbling in pencil. There were clothes and bits of weed and sticky specks of resin, but also a worn collection of Sam Shepard plays, a few loose-leaf essays by David Mamet on the coffee table, a scattering of Playbills with dates scrawled on their covers.

“Thanks for the coffee,” I said.

“Full service.” He didn’t look up.

“I had fun—”

“Dinner later this week?” he said, still scribbling.

“I don’t have your number.” I stood, searching for my cell phone or a scrap of paper, while Leo continued to write. Finally, he pointed across the apartment.

“Get me a pen. I’ll give it to you.”

I walked to the corner where a collection of ink pens and notepads was carelessly heaped on top of a bookshelf. I was scanning for one that was relatively normal when I saw them—a pair of dice. Not just any dice, but astragali like Patrick had in his library. I resisted the urge to palm them and ask Leo where they had come from, if they were replicas or the real thing, and returned with the pen.

“Give me your arm,” said Leo, and I held it out obediently, enjoying the way he embossed the number on my skin, onto the softest part of my arm. “There,” he said, looking up at me. “Now you have it.”





CHAPTER TWELVE


Even after the ink marks had worn off, I could feel his numbers crawling on my skin. But the busy high season at The Cloisters proved a distraction, and every day, I found myself surrounded by buses of camp kids, international tourists, and native New Yorkers looking for an escape from the midday sun. A constant flow of bodies moved through the galleries, steady and lymphatic, pumping energy and heat into the Gothic building; so many of them that the temperature sensors began to tick up and the system itself began to groan. Children stood on the big metal grates set in the floor, enjoying the novelty of the cool air running up their legs. The sound of echoing footsteps was inescapable as people made their way from the bejeweled reliquaries to the frescos of lions and dragons, and on to the paintings of martyred saints.

And as the sun dragged slowly across the skyline, and the heat seemed like it might never leave us, it all was beginning to get to Patrick. His avuncular smiles had given way to hollow cheeks; his flawlessly pressed shirts were now rumpled. And when he spoke to Rachel and me, there was an edge to his questions, an urgency that had been brewing but that now reached a fever pitch alongside the crowds of visitors. Where previously Patrick had put Rachel and me to work on the same material, I noticed that he was now breaking us up. Parceling out archival resources and dividing them between us, and then, much to our frustration, always checking our work, treating us like school children instead of trained and seasoned researchers. As if the lack of information in the archive were our fault, as if we were hiding from him what we really found.

It was for this reason, I assumed, he decided to take me, alone, down to Ketch Antiques that day and leave Rachel in the library, awash in books and translations.

“I need this done before the symposium at the Morgan,” he said to Rachel while he waited for me to gather a few of my things. It was, I realized, a punishment, but I wasn’t entirely sure for whom.

In the cab downtown, however, with The Cloisters behind us, he seemed restored to the Patrick I had known at the beginning of the summer, eager to show me how entangled I was in the mystery of the cards.

“Rachel,” he said, “does excellent work. Truly excellent. But she doesn’t always believe. Not in the way I do. Or, I think, you do. It’s not something that can be taught, that instinct.”

I wanted to protest, to say Rachel shared it too. Or that he was wrong, I still didn’t believe. But I thought back to the night Leo and I stood on the balcony, me holding the Lovers card against my chest, of the spread at The Cloisters that had warned me of a shifting, of a transition, maybe betrayal. I looked across the cab at Patrick, but he was facing the window, a hand along the sill, the tips of his fingers white from pressing down. I knew he still hoped that this deck might be the discovery he had long sought.