Alternate Side(42)
It was while pausing to let their dogs sniff each other that Linda had asked Nora about Charlie’s meeting with a real estate agent. Linda had heard from her husband, Harold, who had heard from George. (Who else?) Nora had not heard about it at all until then. “I just wanted to get a sense of the market,” Charlie said, a bit abashed, but not very. “New York is a young person’s city now.”
“We’re almost the youngest people on this block,” Nora said.
“You know what I mean. All the reasons to live here—they don’t make sense for us. How many times have we gone to the theater in the last year? Or a museum?”
“I run a museum.”
“I mean a real museum,” Charlie said. “No, no, you know—one of the major museums. No, you know what I mean—a big museum.”
“You should stop talking,” Nora said. It was as though he had seen her weakness and decided to poke her with a sharp stick, and it made her want to poke him back, to tell him she was ready to get Bob’s party started. Now she would never mention what had happened earlier that day, after she had taken the stairs from her office to the third floor, where there was a new exhibit, Turquoise of the Southwest. It wasn’t particularly popular, but that wasn’t the point; it was one of their habitual attempts to seem serious. Nora had started an education program for children, with a demonstration from their gemologist and a disquisition about gems as an element of geology. She’d instituted a book club with so many women now enrolled that they had had to field three sections; they read a nonfiction account of the Duchess of Windsor’s collection, a novel about a diamond cutter in Amsterdam, that kind of thing. “The Seven Sisters crowd,” Bebe had said dismissively.
The turquoise exhibit was designed for the curators from other museums, the major museums, the big museums, many of whom had open contempt for the Museum of Jewelry, a contempt that had only grown with the Museum of Jewelry’s attendance figures, which had surpassed the American Folk Art Museum and were now closing in on the Frick. Bebe was obsessed with outdoing the Frick, in a way that suggested she might have wanted to join the board there and had been rebuffed. Sometimes on weekends she would have her driver cruise by what she liked to call her museum on her way to somewhere else, a restaurant downtown, the private airport in New Jersey, and if there was a line of people waiting to get in, she was in a good mood all week long.
An exhibit on the silverwork of the Navajos might impress, or at least mollify, the curators at the more established museums. It was actually a beautiful exhibit—the Museum of the American Indian had loaned them some clay pottery and a few ceremonial robes and headdresses, and the turquoise and silver glowed against a black fabric with a thick nap. But when Nora had gotten up there that afternoon it was empty except for an old woman with a walker, her long black coat almost dragging on the floor because her curved back and forward lurch had made her inches shorter than she once was. A younger woman in stretch pants holding a down jacket was pressed up against an exhibit case across the room. Old woman and paid minder: like twins, they, too, were everywhere in New York City. Every time Nora saw a pair together, indivisible, like skis and poles or salt and pepper shakers, a small voice in her head said, Not me. Behind that was another voice that said, I bet that’s what they once thought, too.
Bang! Bang! Bang! The old woman was hitting the base of the display case with the walker with a strength belied by her stringy, spotted hands. Each time she did, the guard yelled, “Ma’am!” and the aide’s shoulders jumped. Nora could imagine the aide going home every night, slipping her black lace-up shoes past her bunions, sighing, and saying to her husband, or her sister, or her kids, “That lady is a handful and a half.” Nora wondered if even Ricky’s wife, Nita, could have kept her under control. She couldn’t blame the guard for doing nothing.
When Nora moved to the older woman’s side, she swiveled with the walker in her hand and Nora stepped back a bit. “Can I help you?” Nora said quietly.
“That’s mine!” the woman shouted, pointing to the large squash-blossom necklace that was the centerpiece of the exhibit. It was not particularly valuable, especially compared to most of what they had, but the center turquoise was very fine and the etchings intricate.
“And that,” said the woman, gesturing with the walker as the guard moved forward behind her. “That, too.” A bracelet. Another bracelet. Another necklace. They were all from Bebe’s personal collection, although Nora had never been able to imagine her wearing them. “I can’t abide silver,” Bebe had told her once. “It’s so ordinary. Forks and spoons, okay. Jewelry? Forget it.”
“They’re beautiful pieces,” Nora said.
“Oh, good Lord above,” said the aide behind her.
“They were purchased in Santa Fe,” the woman said. “There’s a lot of cheap copies for sale out there. These are the real thing.” Her voice sounded like a door that needed its hinges oiled.
“Why don’t we go to my office? You can tell me more.”
For the first time the woman looked up at Nora. The whites of her eyes were a faded yellow, the irises a milky brown, as though if she lived long enough, the colors would meet in the middle. The look in her eyes was knowing, almost predatory, and her first thought, that the woman was senile and confusing jewelry she’d once owned with what they had on exhibit, evaporated.