The Cloisters(53)

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

It was Aruna, who had appeared soundlessly at my side.

“I did.”

“I find these sorts of things exhausting now,” she said. “Almost sad. All these aging obsessives, still fretting over the same works that have vexed scholars for centuries. Have you ever wondered why you want to be here, and not”—she pulled out a cigarette case and held it out to me—“on Wall Street, making real money?”

I declined, wondering if one day I would just say yes. Become a smoker too. Some days it seemed inescapable.

“Don’t idolize it,” she said.

“I don’t.”

“Don’t lie, either.”

She tapped some ash off the end of her cigarette, and I laughed.

“So many of us here just wanted to spend our lives studying something. To be in libraries and classrooms, to be in archives and museums, to feel history through the things it left behind. But to do that is not to be with the living, Ann. You must remember that. And some of us survive all this death better than others.”

“To me,” I said, “this seems very much alive.”

“Yes. But that’s a fiction. It’s dead. All of it. That’s the real task of the scholar, to become a necromancer. Do you know what I mean, Ann?”

“I do.” But I wasn’t sure I did.

“Good. Because so many of us forget the true purpose is to reanimate the thing, even sometimes at the cost of animating ourselves.”

Standing on those stairs it was hard not to feel the weight of the past around us. After all, weren’t museums just mausoleums? Quite literally in the case of The Cloisters.

“Have you considered law school?” asked Aruna.

I looked at her and she just laughed.

“It might not be too late,” I said.

“Well, if this summer still hasn’t dissuaded you,” she said, “please feel free to come to me for advice in the fall. It helps to have someone on the inside.”

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.

“And good for you. Not making a fool of yourself by attempting to pander to every faculty member in attendance. Desperation. Always a bad look. Particularly in academia, where we reward effortless achievement, not years of struggle.” She stepped on the end of her cigarette and pressed a cool hand on my arm. “That’s what Rachel has learned faster than most,” she whispered.

A quick squeeze and she was gone, seamlessly mingling between the last remaining groups of academics before making her way to the edge of Madison Avenue, where she slid into a cab and offered me one last wave goodbye. I began to lift my hand, but then noticed the number of people who also raised a hand, so instead, I inclined my head, the small gesture setting me apart from the others.

I waited until I was the only one left standing on the stairs and settled into the sound of the cars on the street, a steady stream of activity, the sound of things alive.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


It was better, arriving at The Cloisters in a town car. And I quickly forgot what it was like to worry about being jostled on the subway, coffee in hand, or timing my arrival so that I might make the shuttle. Living together opened up pockets of time with Rachel we hadn’t had before: the commute, the breakfasts, the time after dinner. And in those pockets, I found myself finally able to unfold, to let Rachel see me fully. I liked to believe she felt the same way too.

Patrick, it was clear, did not.

During our first day back in the library after the Morgan symposium, he said to us, “Living together and working together can be a strain on a friendship. Best not to push too hard and see if it breaks. No?”

“It’s different with girls,” was all Rachel had said to him.

But we could see his discomfort that we were always together now. The way he watched us, always hoping to trace the origins of some inside joke along the contours of our faces.

That day, the gardens of The Cloisters hummed with the energy of visitors and pollinators, and I, unable to forget the secret that hummed inside me, inside Rachel now too, walked the perimeter until I got to the Bonnefont Cloister with its bright green quince trees and gnarled branches. I didn’t want to sit, so I stood, overlooking the edge of the garden, which gave way to steep stone ramparts and the ground, nearly one hundred feet below.

My palms placed on the top of the stone wall, I leaned out just to feel the precariousness of my situation, to let the adrenaline surge through my body until I could feel it again, the same feeling I had had when I revealed the Huntress card, the quick sprint of fear, the bite of urgency. If only so I could enjoy the wave of relief that followed. The moment when nothing happened, when I didn’t fall, when Patrick didn’t catch me, when Rachel and I, ultimately, would get away with it.

New York had shown me how hungry I was. Hungry for joy and risk, hungry to admit, aloud to everyone around me, my ambitions. Hungry to realize them. Instead of being filled with fear, I was filled with a kind of giddy joy. And the knowledge that in a city like this, it was possible to start over, to make the memory of my father something that drove me forward, not something that held me back. Beating Patrick to the discovery of the tarot deck would be the biggest accomplishment of all. I wasn’t immoral; I simply understood the lesson the city was teaching me.

As I leaned out over the wall again to the see the cobblestone road below, I felt two hands around my waist give me a quick push forward. I screamed, loudly and sharply.