Heart of the City (33 page)

UP THE escalator and past the European painting rooms, Bob entered the new exhibit, searching. He had somehow missed this in the program. But what an idea: the Met had lowered its drawbridge. It was letting people inside the castle. It had given in to the urge to tell its own story, to make sense of the past ten years of its life. The museum, Bob thought appreciatively, was in psychoanalysis.

The museum had even made public the examination list curators used to size up possible acquisitions. Bob studied the dozen or so stages of evaluation. Immediate impression. Description. Condition, wear, and age. Style. History. Outside expert advice. Scientific analysis. Doubts list. Then, “Conclusion: Does the work stack up to the original impression?”

He walked past a Renaissance bed, a terra-cotta relief by Thorvaldsen, and some carvings from pre-Columbian Mexico before finding himself in a room of Egyptian antiquities: a quartz lion god from 3100 BC; a limestone bust of a king; the head of Amenhotep III, carved in black stone. The room was half lit, and Bob had thought it empty. But then he heard a footstep at the other end and froze: Her. Behind the cascades of blond hair was an intelligent, almost philosophical face. With her fingers laced behind her back, she was studying the plaque beside some ruin. A
vision
. That was the word that came to him:
vision.
With his arms clasped behind his back, he moved toward her, keeping his eyes on the display cases.

“It’s funny,” he began, looking at her for a second, then back at the display. “This term ‘dynasty’ they’ve got on all the panels. Weren’t the historical periods in Egypt called kingdoms?”

He was blessed—or cursed, he sometimes thought—with an almost perfect recall of trivia from the classes he’d taken in college as breadth requirements. At parties with other graduate students, he found that these morsels, when strategically dispensed, gave him a worldly air. But the woman turned and stepped to the next case without so much as a glance. Did she think he was talking to someone else? Maybe she didn’t hear?

Bob caught up to her and said, “Did you have a chance to see any of the Cycladic figurines in the other room? I don’t think it occurred to me until today just how much influence they must have had on Brancusi’s work from the ’30s. Have you seen his figures at the Guggenheim?”

She tilted her head only far enough for him to see her roll her eyes. Then she stalked away.

Just behind him, now, a voice: stentorian, effulgent. It hooked him like a gaff to the neck. “Why, young man,” it said, “I could not agree more with what you just said.”

His first impression, after turning around, was not a pleasant one. Just five inches away, with a smile that seemed to express gratitude, was a strong-shouldered matron in her early sixties,
white curls festooning a red face and bifocals, her girth magnified by a lumpy black coat. The absurdity of the situation settled around him like the walls of a padded cell. “With what
I
just said?” Bob said.

“Who else, silly?” she said. “Brancusi. Of
course
Brancusi
.
Never in this museum have I heard anything so incisive. And from Mrs. Silverman, you should know, that’s a high compliment.”

God save me, Bob thought.

MARA HAD perfected the art of escape. Her long blond hair, slim physique, and Scandinavian-looking features drew constant stares from men, some of whom apparently felt it reasonable to simply start following her. Her life was in this way a paradox: she was a loner with too much would-be company, most of it male. Mara wasn’t like those of her friends who, for fear of being alone, strung one boyfriend along until a better one came along. Men, with their persistence, their need to control, made her easily claustrophobic. Mara had made peace with loneliness as a girl. She had learned compensations. And so the moment a boyfriend fell short, she was gone.

She was a distaff Houdini, particularly when some stranger was in pursuit, as there appeared to be now. She considered the options: duck through a side door to the women’s restroom, flee to another wing of the museum, or just leave. She had been enjoying the exhibit; she didn’t want to leave. But there was his voice again, with another pretentious observation. She could feel that he was close. She knew that if she so much as glanced his way, he would take encouragement. So she turned away, dropping her gaze to the floor and taking in, to her left, no more than a pair of saddle shoes.

Then, divine intervention. Another voice—an older woman’s, bracing, proud—answered the man’s question, the one Mara was sure had been posed to her. Mara skipped ahead, then looked
over her shoulder. Saddle Shoes was at a safe remove. He was tall. His back was toward her. He was nearly nose-to-nose with this implausible, larger-than-life interloper.

The predator turned prey. Mara smiled to herself and made her getaway.

BOB COULD hardly remember the last time someone found him so interesting. This Mrs. Silverman seemed so tickled by his every observation that at any moment he half expected her to take his arm and invite him to a home-cooked meal. Her full name was Iris Silverman, she confided. She was a retired school-teacher from the Upper West Side and a sucker for people who loved art like she loved art.

Bob played along, mixing half-remembered details from one of his art history classes with tidbits from a television program on the ancients he’d recently seen on PBS. “That’s delightful,” Mrs. Silverman said, chortling. And Bob had to admit: her contributions to the conversation were reasonably well informed. They sauntered from case to case, passing a tomb door and a statue of the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis. Mrs. Silverman laughed at his jokes and patted him sympathetically on the arm. All the while, the woman Bob really wanted was slipping further and further away.

THERE WAS no harm in looking now. Mara was far enough away, and Saddle Shoes so engrossed with his new companion, that she would escape notice. He was interesting-looking, this man. Jeans, a bright red jacket, and a crewneck sweater over a T-shirt. Intelligent eyes. And young. Well, younger than she. He and whoever this woman was were speaking with enough brio for Mara—and really everyone—to hear. He was a little full of himself maybe, but there was more in his head than just one lucky
pickup line. His face—that heavy brow—looked a little pained. Yet he
was
listening to this odd lady, at least twice his age, and was even making a kind of effort to amuse her.

Without knowing why precisely, Mara stopped. She stood in front of a 3,400-year-old Egyptian object the wall label called a “mirror.” It was a battered bronze disk now far too worn for reflection. She waited there, kneeling slightly, studying its details, as Saddle Shoes and big coat lady inched nearer. In a minute, they were beside her. Despite herself, Mara turned, straightened, and threaded a strand of hair behind her ear. Then she looked at him.

“When you look in that mirror,” she asked casually, “what do you see?”

“I see a civilization that set great store by appearances.”

Mara was surprised by his tone. He was responding not like a man twice blown off, but as though Mara had been part of the conversation all along. She saw now that he had clear blue eyes, a dimpled chin, a head of wavy chestnut brown hair. Big coat lady was at his other elbow, looking at Mara cautiously, as if it were occurring to her that she had perhaps unfairly wrested this young man from his date.

“Yes, precisely,” Mara said. “The pharaohs and their mummies. If they wore that much makeup in death, you might imagine the fuss they made in life.”

“Egyptians pioneered cosmetics, didn’t they?” said Saddle Shoes. “All that eyeliner, Cleopatra’s baths in milk and honey.”

Mara stepped to the next display case. “Yes, and they fetishized youth and certain arrangements of facial bones. I don’t know if in that sense their culture was much different from our own. You’ve seen Nefertiti?”

“Haven’t met her. But I’ve seen photos of the bust in magazines.”

“A cover girl. By my lights she’d have as many admirers on Madison Avenue today as she did as the wife of Akhenaten.”

They entered a series of rooms of modern photographs—Man Ray, Walker Evans. Mara looked over her shoulder. Big coat lady was nowhere to be found.

THIS WOMAN wasn’t what Bob had expected. He had picked up stunners before. But even when he got to know them, their looks continued, for him, to be their winningest asset. This curious woman, however, had managed a bait and switch. No sooner had she started talking than her physical beauty receded. Something else held him: the way her words, voice, and hand movements worked together, with a ballerina’s grace, to give shape to some idea. The turning up of a palm, the raising of a shoulder. Her almost slow-motion delivery of words, so that each syllable received its due. And a way of connecting the least congruous of ideas, so that what seemed to defy logic one second made perfect sense the next.

Another thing that struck him was that her speech had none of the fashionable intonations—were they borrowed from Mary Tyler Moore?—that made so many women he knew, regardless of intelligence, sound the same. This woman’s words, if anything, were literary, a little eccentric even. He couldn’t place it.