The Cloisters(60)

But as much as I was drawn to the cards, was desperate to hold them, even lay them out in a grid to see what they could tell me, I needed to know what had happened last night, this morning, to me, to Rachel, to Leo, to Patrick, to all of us. To the world of The Cloisters.

“Can you believe this?” Rachel said, looking at the cards. “Have you seen these?”

“Rachel—what happened last night?”

“First come look at them.”

I walked to the edge of the table, taking in the cards’ refined swirls of paint and the feathery features of the figures. In the corners of each card, I noticed the distinctive shape of a white eagle crowned in gold. The imprimatur of the d’Este. The same eagle that appeared on the archival documents we’d seen at the Morgan, and again, in Lingraf’s papers. And as much as I wanted to talk about what happened last night, I couldn’t look away from the scene on the table. Nothing, I knew, was as powerful as curiosity. I had always considered it more powerful than lust. After all, wasn’t that why Adam bit into the apple? Because he was curious? Because he needed to know? For research. I picked up the World card, which showed the full heavens with Saturn in the center, his mouth agape, a child in the palm of his hand.

“They’re incredible.”

“Can you imagine what we’ll be able to do with these?”

I folded my arms. “What happened last night?” I asked again.

Rachel was still dreamily gazing at the cards, and it took her a minute to shake herself back into our world.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I woke up here. I don’t remember much after the second spread. It’s like my memory has a big black spot. There’s almost nothing from midnight until six a.m.”

It was the same gap I had. “But when you left?”

“When I left, Patrick was fine. You and Leo were fine.”

“Leo and I, we were still there?”

Rachel shook her head and pulled out one of the chairs. “I think so? Honestly, I don’t know for sure. All I know is that in my last memory of Patrick, he was alive. And that I woke up here this morning. And that you weren’t here.”

Rachel let it hang between us. Not an accusation per se, but a way of tempering her involvement with my own. An acknowledgment, again, that whatever had happened, it was shared, that we had participated together, willingly.

“I woke up at Leo’s.”

“And what do you remember?”

“About as much as you. The reading. And then I was sick, and Leo tried to feed me. Whatever it was, it was more powerful than I expected it to be. But Leo didn’t seem that overwhelmed.”

“Tolerance,” said Rachel, adding, “learned tolerance.”

I hadn’t considered that Leo might have done the drugs before, more than once even, but it made sense.

“Do you think it was an overdose?” I asked Rachel, wondering if I remembered what had happened to the cups we had used, even what we had done with the little plastic packets.

“A bad reaction maybe?”

“But we all took the same dose, the same mixture.”

“It could have just been bad luck.”

I didn’t respond. There was no way to articulate the darkness I had felt that evening, and I was certain it was more than just bad luck.



* * *



I wanted the days after Patrick’s death to be different, but The Cloisters opened every day except Wednesday at 10 a.m., and the visitors who streamed through the galleries surely didn’t read the small article that ran in the New York Times, commemorating the untimely passing of a celebrated curator of medieval art. No one else used the library on those bright summer days, preferring instead the glitter of sun on their skin, the dampness of grass under their thighs. But Rachel and I remained in the green leather chairs, at the large oak tables, surrounded by volumes on art and architecture.

“Just keep doing what you’ve been doing,” said Michelle de Forte when she made her way up to The Cloisters for a visit the following week. “The new curator may simply want to move ahead with Patrick’s work. Both of you should continue under that assumption.”

“How long until you find someone?” asked Rachel.

We were standing in the library, surrounded by books, some of which Rachel had propped open, one revealing a medieval manuscript that illustrated the signs of the zodiac and which bodily functions they oversaw—Libra, the small intestine, Scorpio, the genitals.

Michelle looked between us and the door to Patrick’s office.

“We’re doing our best,” she said, “but we don’t want to hire fast and make a mistake. Until then—” She shrugged and made her way back out into the sunshine of the garden.

That was all she told us. Until Rachel’s phone rang the next day.

“It’s belladonna, the coroner is certain,” Michelle said.

There was a thinness to her voice, a tightness that couldn’t release, except, perhaps, explosively, a result she was working to head off. We were sitting at the edge of the garden, the phone held between us, the volume as low as we could manage.

“When they completed the autopsy,” Michelle continued, “they found it in his tissues and blood. Large amounts. Potent amounts of poison.”

“A suicide?” Rachel mused.