The Cloisters(87)
“How do you think Moira will like Beatrice?” Rachel asked between sips of soda.
Beatrice Graft had been hired to replace Patrick. A professor at Columbia and frequent lecturer at The Cloisters, she had always been a front-runner for the job.
“I think Moira believes she should be appointed curator,” I said.
“Patrick once told me that she had been hired in her thirties. Can you imagine? She must have been there at least thirty years.”
I could believe it. Moira had the look of someone who had been in the Gothic halls of the museum far too long—pale and watchful, bursting, I knew, with secrets.
“Do you think you’ll be okay?” asked Rachel. There was genuine concern in her voice. “It will be like starting over. A new me, a new Leo, a new Patrick.”
Those weren’t necessarily bad things, I thought.
“I’ll manage.”
“That’s what I told Michelle,” said Rachel, looking past me to a table occupied by a young couple. “I told her you would be able to anchor the place with all the turmoil. Even though you haven’t been there very long, I told her you could handle it. She hadn’t been sure, you know, if you would be a good fit, long-term. But I reassured her.”
“Thanks,” I said. Although there was something in the statement I didn’t like: the specter of indebtedness, of my own insufficiency.
“Don’t mention it. That’s what friends are for. Plus, I like knowing where you’ll be in case I need you.”
We ate in silence as night spread through the town, stars easily visible beyond the one streetlight. It struck me then that Rachel’s generosity—the thing I had been so taken with, the thing that seemed so genuine—was actually the source of her control. She was both benefactor and micromanager, skillfully moving us through our paces, and sheltering us with privilege while we complied. And while it was clear that she liked me, she also believed she was smarter, more capable.
Before we left the city, I had called Laure and told her everything, just in case something went wrong. She believed me without question, barely an inflection in her voice as I explained it. Though she wanted to know things like, Was I okay? I had assured her that I was.
Rachel, I realized, had created, or been at the center of, so much loss. I knew how that changed a person. And so, I had wanted to feel around in Rachel’s loss, try it on for size. I remembered the way I had cut out every article about my father’s death and saved them—sometimes they were only a few lines long. His obituary had been barely the length of my thumb. It was my memory of his obituary that first caused me to go back and read articles about Rachel’s parents’ deaths. And there were many of them: local reports by the Post-Star Gazette that gave a full page to describing the recovery efforts, the damage to the boat, the state Rachel had been in when she was found. And then wanting to feel her loss even more, I moved on to articles from the Yale Daily News about her roommate’s suicide. With every word I read, things that had once seemed unlucky, predestined, inescapable, looked less like fate and more like design.
Rachel crinkled up our paper wrappers and walked them to the trash.
On the drive back, we let our hands dangle out the window, invigorating our skin. By the time we arrived at the house, it was late. Rachel put on a record in the living room, its scratchy sound echoing through the wooden house and out the open windows onto the shores of the lake where it tried, but failed, to drown out the chorus of crickets.
She folded herself onto an old chair and opened a book, a glass of wine on the table next to her. We had spent a lot of time on our first trip to Long Lake reading, and for this trip I had packed a novel I had been meaning to read for some time—Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the thick, worn copy I had taken from Patrick’s office.
On the couch, I opened the book and fanned through its pages, until they stopped, sharply, at the end. And there, at the back, tucked against the paperback cover, was a card. I recognized the deep blue backing immediately, the scattering of gold stars that made up the constellations in the night sky. I looked up and saw Rachel engrossed in her book. I flipped the card over. It was the missing card, the Devil. The card that completed the deck. Its fake front already stripped away to reveal Janus, the god of transitions and duality. Patrick, I was shocked to discover, had always known about the hidden cards beneath.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I kept my discovery to myself even when, the next day, we lay on soft terry beach towels and pushed our toes into the sand. A tilted umbrella provided a sliver of shade as the sun worked its way west. At the far end, a bank of clouds was gathering. I waded out into the lake, its rocky shoreline pricking at my feet every few steps until I was far enough to dive under. The water filled my ears as my arms sliced through the air, carrying me to the old swim platform that was moored off the beach.
And as I pulled myself onto its surface, raw and full of flaking pieces of wood, I admired how brown my arms had become, the slenderness of my body courtesy of the New York summer. I had always loved the last gasps of the season. The endless drumbeat of bright August sunshine and dry grass in Walla Walla, where the return to the classroom was the first signal that fall was coming, and soon, the brooding skies of winter. I knew that the skies in New York would do more than brood. As hot as the summer had been, winter would be cold. Biting, Leo had said one night, leaning out onto his fire escape to exhale the joint he was smoking. Even so, I couldn’t wait to feel the winter wind come off the Hudson. I lay on the platform until I felt my skin prickling and mottled with heat, then dove back into the lake, swimming ashore.