The Cloisters(41)

The false front, I realized, had been held in place by a dab of flour and water in each corner, a drying substance that flaked off when I brushed it, gently, with the pad of my finger. The card I had revealed was lyrical and dramatic in its execution. Its color pale but saturated, the imagery diverse and arcane. But a word—trixcaccia—written on the card was indecipherable to me. Not because of the lettering, but because of the language. It was almost recognizable: a Neapolitan-Latin hybrid perhaps, that had an air of the familiar.

The card I held in my hand had the uncanny character some works of art have, the ability to draw you in, an absorptive quality. The first time I’d experienced anything like it was actually with a reproduction. A careful copy of Botticelli’s fresco of the graces that is housed at the Louvre, but that had been copied, in painstaking detail, for an exhibition in Seattle. I could have looked at that fresco for the entire day, its graceful figures and washed-out colors. The card in my hand had the same quality, as if I were falling into it, a pool of beauty.

The sound of footsteps from upstairs brought me back to the present, and I quickly set about getting the false front to re-adhere to the card I had revealed underneath. I stopped short of wetting the flour again for fear that I might damage the paint, but there was no way to reunite the two. In the moments that followed, it never crossed my mind to return the card to the packet, or share my discovery with Patrick. Instead, I pulled out my bag and emptied everything from my wallet—all cards, coins, dollars, anything that might scratch the surface of the card—and then, I zipped the card inside.

As I set my bag back on the floor and reopened the copy of Zola I had been reading, now to a random page a little ways in, the door at the end of the room opened and Patrick and Stephen came in, still in close conference.

“You’ll let me know if you hear of anything else?” said Patrick.

“Of course, of course,” said Stephen. “You’ll be the first one I call.”

I watched Patrick hand over a thick envelope and Stephen pass him a slip of paper.

“Don’t keep that,” he said. “Best not to have receipts in easy reach if anyone has questions. But I realize you might want something for right now.”

Patrick nodded, and having walked back to where I was sitting, handed me the receipt and reached for the packet.

I looked at it and read: three tarot cards. I slipped it into my purse, wondering how long I might have before Patrick realized there were only two in the envelope.



* * *



For the rest of the day I feared Patrick would notice the card’s absence. Sitting in the library, I tried, unsuccessfully, to push away the fear of him coming out and demanding to know where it was, the card, the discovery. I found it impossible to focus, and even when I walked through the gardens and tried to force myself to breathe, the smell of lavender and the brush of the grasses against my skin could not calm me.

Rachel joined me at the edge of the Bonnefont Cloister.

“What happened downtown?” she said, shaking out a cigarette and lighting it, her movements quick and sharp.

“Nothing,” I said. “We picked up a few more cards.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all.” I wasn’t ready to tell Rachel, tell anyone, what I had discovered, but I could feel in her questioning something urgent, something that made my skin feel tight and my face flush.

“Okay.” She paused to exhale a stream of smoke. “Because he’s in there on the phone, and he sounds furious.”

What could I say? That the thing Patrick was angry about was sitting only a few feet from his office, tucked safely into my bag. No. And so, not wanting to reveal my secret, I said the one thing Rachel and I had been leaving unspoken between us, though we both had observed it.

“He’s been so on edge, so desperate to make this work, to have something ready for the Morgan. Do you think, maybe, it’s all beginning to get to him? The fact we’ve found so little? The fact it seems like nothing is there?”

Rachel looked at me from the corner of her eye, just a glance, and nodded.

“What do you think about getting out of here for the weekend?” she said. “I think we should go together.”

I had wanted to spend the weekend with the card, alone. To maybe have that dinner with Leo. But she continued:

“The Morgan symposium starts on Monday. That gives us almost three days if we leave today. Can you leave today?”

“Where did you want to go?” I asked.

“Long Lake,” she said. “To the camp.”

I had never heard the term camp used to describe anything other than places where children learned the basic skills of archery and spent slow afternoons making friendship bracelets, but I was certain Rachel was referring to something else entirely.

“Yes,” I said. “And Patrick?”

“I’ll tell him. I’ll go tell him right now. Just pack a few things for the weekend and meet me at my apartment. I’ll text you the address.”

“Right now?”

“Unless you want to stay and see how this all plays out?”

She was right. I pulled out my phone and texted Leo—rain check?—even though he had yet to follow up about his passing invite. Briefly, I watched the three gray dots bounce on my screen, but I didn’t wait for his response. I needed to put some distance between Patrick and myself. If the card was a life raft, I knew there would not be room for all three of us.