The Cloisters(70)

It wasn’t the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me, but in that moment, it felt like it. I tried to hide my smile under the brim of his hat as we walked out of the apartment.



* * *



We spent the day in a haze, moving from one bookshop to another. Visiting a store that specialized in rare vinyl and a bar that specialized in cocktails named after famous Beat writers. We walked the streets of the Village, and I was reminded again of how neighborhoody New York could be, almost suburban in these little enclaves, each with its own distinctive identity. There were flowers and thickly leafed trees. There were rich young mothers being dragged down the street to the playground by their children, the nanny on her day off. And there was the heat. The humidity and the lack of breeze, the way it amplified the smell of the bartender taking his cigarette break, the exhaust from the delivery truck, the Thai curry restaurant that was preparing for its lunch buffet. And beneath it all, the smell of hot asphalt, the metallic, earthy smell of the city in summer.

I hadn’t expected to fall in love with New York, but falling in love can make a city burn brighter. I sometimes wondered if I took Leo outside of the five boroughs if he would have the same luster, if the city itself would, from a distance. But I loved the bigness and the smallness of it, the weirdness and the joy. It wasn’t home, and I didn’t know if it ever would be, but it was where I was supposed to be, in that moment. Then, maybe forever.

Things had never happened to me until I arrived in New York. In Walla Walla, everything was predictable—the same coffee, the same shops, the same people in line. The only discoveries to be made were those that had been made dozens, or hundreds, of times before by other people, other students, other scholars. But here, it seemed like there was nothing else to do but discover. And even when you weren’t looking for them, the discoveries found you. The city had a way of making everything feel cosmic and inevitable—magical.

We were walking toward where the Cedar Tavern used to be when Leo’s phone rang. At first he ignored it, but then the ringing began again, and I could see on the screen it was a local area code. He picked it up.

“This is Leo.”

While he talked, I turned to study the display of the business next to us. It sold pens and expensive stationery supplies. In the window were sheaves of embossed paper, fanned in a semicircle like playing cards. Everything, a sign in the window told me, could be monogrammed for a fee.

“Now really isn’t a good time—Right, I understand.”

I tried not to listen, but I thought I recognized Detective Murphy’s voice. Her flat affect.

“I could come in on Monday morning? Sure. Yeah, you could meet me at the gardens.”

Then a beat.

“Yes, I can walk you through what we grow. Ten would be best.”

He pocketed the phone and turned to me, his shoulders up around his ears and his hands in his pockets.

“They want to talk to you again?”

“Yeah. Procedure, she said.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, reaching out to wrap my small hand in his. “None of us really know what Patrick did that night after we left.”

“Did they mention me in your interview?”

I shook my head. “They said you had told them about Patrick and Rachel.”

“What did you say?”

“Just that I’d never seen them together.”

“Ann. That makes it look like I’m lying.”

I took a step back. “No, it doesn’t. I was telling the truth. I never saw them together. At least not in that way, not intimately.” I knew how quickly this could escalate into a real fight. And I didn’t want to have to expose my fault lines between Leo and Rachel, outlines that were still hazy, even to me. “I’m not trying to make you look like a liar,” I said.

Leo nodded and we started walking again, shoulder to shoulder, until after a few steps he put his arm around me and pulled me in closer.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get day drunk like the Abstract Expressionists.”



* * *



We didn’t end up getting day drunk, or rather, I didn’t. Leo had four Manhattans and almost an entire pack of cigarettes before we parted company for the day. He never told me about the thing he had that meant I couldn’t spend the night, but I heard him tell the cab to take him downtown. I walked to the subway and took it back to Rachel’s apartment, which was dark and empty.

Rachel wasn’t there, and I couldn’t remember a time when I had been alone in the apartment. I threw my bag down on my bed, where late-afternoon sunlight spilled in, warming the parquet floors, the white bedding, the walls. I pulled out the box of tarot cards and lightly moved them around, taking care not to damage the gold leaf, and selected three cards, my eyes closed. I opened my eyes and arranged the Eight of Staves, the Queen of Swords, and the third card, a card we were considering the Chariot—with the Roman god Mercury transported in a golden chariot by a phalanx of horses—on the table. It was a spread that spoke of sharpness, dramatic change, reversal, speeding up. I held my hands over the cards for a moment, imagining how they might have glittered in fifteenth-century candlelight, before returning them to their box.

In the living room, with Rachel gone, I wanted to let my curiosity loose. I inspected every bookshelf: those that were full of medieval treatises and academic art history books, those that displayed silver-framed photos of Rachel. Several with her parents, one with a girl wearing a Yale sweatshirt. But when I took the frame off the shelf and inspected the back, where an unfamiliar name and date were tacked—Sarah, Yale, 2012—my phone rang. I let it go to voice mail and studied the image. The girl had round cheeks and small, close-set eyes. They were both smiling. Smiling in a way I had never seen Rachel smile, open and excited. There were no other photographs with friends. Just her parents and a few solo photos: Rachel taking in the mosaics in Ravenna. Rachel in Central Park, at Tavern on the Green, blowing out birthday candles.