“I’m going to—”
“I’m there,” she said almost inaudibly, and tipped over the edge again. He followed her with a groan that reverberated around the small room, and for one blissful, unsustainable moment he held her together, body and soul.
—
He flushed the condom and zipped up; she wet down some paper towels and cleaned up, then adjusted her bra and dress. When he stepped out of the stall, she smoothed down his lapels. “You know,” she said conversationally, “most men, when confronted with a woman on the verge of fainting, sit her down and tell her to put her head between her legs while he gets her a glass of water.”
He turned her to face the mirror and zipped up her dress. “I’m not most men,” he said quietly, then turned her full circle to face him again. “More practically, there was nowhere to sit upstairs, and you don’t take coddling well.”
She smiled and pressed her face into his jacket. “I don’t?”
“You get all tense and ruffled, like Jessie’s cat when she goes from purring to hissing in a split second.”
She smiled again, this time against the lump in her throat. It was true. “I do,” she said.
“Anyway, I put my head between your legs,” he said. “Close enough?”
This time the smile came with a huff of laughter. “Your filthy mouth.”
“This entire relationship started because I have a filthy mouth. You love my filthy mouth.”
“I do,” she said again. “I really do. Were you staking your claim in front of Colin or making me feel better?”
“Yes.” Completely seriously. The possessiveness startled her. He’d said she knew how to handle herself, and yet he’d done the most primitive, caveman thing possible. “Another man was looking at you in a way he had no right to look at you.”
It wasn’t fair to blame Colin because he reminded her of someone she wanted to keep in her past, but it was such a small moment of weakness, an alignment of the planets and stars and ley lines jerking her into a past she’d left behind. Colin just reminded her exactly why she couldn’t reach out and claim what was rightfully hers. And yet she couldn’t stop stepping onto the ledge; this time she’d brought Daniel onto the ledge with her.
“He’s a man. Men look. Quite frankly, I encourage them to look. They often make stupid decisions when they do.”
“It’s your husband’s job to remind them not to look,” Daniel said. “Or be a little more subtle about it.” His gaze skimmed her and apparently found her sufficiently refreshed to go back upstairs. “You’re going to be pink for a while,” he said, and stroked her cheek with the back of his index finger.
“I’ve brazened that out before,” she said. “As have you, I suspect.”
“You suspect right.” He kissed her gently. “Let’s go.”
March, Vernal Equinox
U
until the swollen clouds opened to dump their contents on the city sidewalks, the task was simple: visit Sheba to celebrate the show’s success. Stopping at the shops to buy sandwiches, salads, fresh fruit, two packages of cookies, and several bottles of mineral water was a chance to get out of a cold March rain. Fat drops pelted her Burberry and Wellingtons as she tightened one gloved hand around the plastic shopping bags’ handles and tilted the umbrella against the wind with the other. Her coat was thoroughly soaked, rainwater trickling down her shins when she rang the buzzer at Sheba’s door.
A click was all she got. “It’s Tilda Davies,” she said loudly, then the door lock clicked open.
Tilda climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. This time the door was cracked, heat billowing into the hallway. Tilda left the umbrella in the industrial hallway, shut the door behind her, and began the process of shedding a thoroughly wet coat. Her boots were cheerful, practical, and thoroughly unprofessional, and stayed on, although she dried them on the mat. When she turned back around, she found Sheba watching her, a mischievous smile on her lined face.
“You look like a drowned rat, child,” Sheba said, then laughed.
Tilda scrubbed her fingertips across her scalp, sending droplets to the floor. “It’s absolutely pouring out there,” she said, and reached into her bag for the statement carefully zipped into the lining. She held it out to Sheba.
“How much?”
“Open it. It’s just an estimate, mind you. Edith will have a check in a couple of weeks.”
Sheba took the envelope, slit it with an X-ACTO knife, puffed air into the body of the envelope, and extracted the page. Tilda knew exactly how much it was, a considerable amount less the commissions paid to herself and Edith. Written in red ink at the bottom of the statements in Edith’s careful hand was,
We really must do this again!
Sheba whooped and danced in a wide circle around the worktable before enveloping Tilda in a huge hug. “We did it!”
“I didn’t do anything,” Tilda said into Sheba’s shoulder. “The palimpsests are your work. I just found someone to host the show.”
Sheba let her go, twirling away to toss the statement on her worktable. “I’ve had twenty phone calls from critics and former gallery owners, another twenty from former students, and ten people I hadn’t seen in ages stopped by. I’m practically a social butterfly.”
Tilda said, “If you want to resume working with someone more familiar with the art world, I understand.”
“No. No no no, child. Not a chance. You’re my girl now. They want anything of mine, they have to come through you.”
She blinked. Sheba didn’t know about the impending Quality deal, or what it might mean for West Village Stationery; long-term relationships like this weren’t her area. “I don’t have the right connections to get you the prices you deserve. You need an agent from Sotheby’s, or a dealer.”
“Nope. No way. They didn’t want me when I was a washed-up nobody. I need exactly what I’ve got. My Lady Matilda.”
“I’m not a lady,” Tilda said, but she couldn’t help laughing. Sheba’s delight was infectious, just as Daniel’s calm grounded her. “It’s a title bestowed on the children or wives of peers. My mother lectures at uni—”
“You brought lunch,” Sheba said, and pulled the bottle of champagne from the bag.
“I thought we should celebrate.”
Sheba wore a men’s white long-sleeved undershirt under a paint-smeared wool sweater and equally ruined jeans. “I like the way you think,” she said, and took the bottle over to the kitchen lining the back wall of the loft. “My son followed the tweet stream from LA. He says there was even a write-up in the LA papers.”
“I’ve also been inundated with calls,” Tilda said as she unpacked the white carrier bag. “Every art buyer in the city wants one of these, either for a museum or a private collector, but I think we should wait a bit. Build the anticipation rather than flooding the market.”
“Agreed,” Sheba said as she got down mismatched plates, followed by two very expensive champagne glasses. She handed Tilda serving spoons to scoop out salads. “In the meantime, take a few pieces that will look very good in your display cases.”
Her gaze skimmed over Tilda, then lingered on the thin silver ring on her left hand. “I met your husband at the show.”
Her husband. Daniel. Even three months after the wedding, she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. There were moments that felt exactly like they did before Daniel asked her to marry him, moments like the one on the beach. But there were others when she felt like she was living someone else’s life, when the ring glinted in the sun or someone noticed it and commented, usually with an enthusiasm that surprised Tilda. It felt odd for her, a permanency she never thought she’d claim. She told herself it took a while for the change in status to set in, that the honeymoon period was an adjustment on every level.
“What did you think?” she asked lightly as she set sandwiches on the plate.
Sheba tilted her head to the left, and smiled a slow, sweet, sad smile. “He’s utterly enamored with you,” she said, then turned back to the page in front of her. “What does he do?”
“He’s with the FBI.”
“He dresses like a teacher.”
Tilda remembered the slight scratch of Daniel’s wool vest, the rasp of the tweed against her sensitive skin. “He says he does it to fool criminals into thinking he’s an easy mark.”
“Does it work?” Sheba picked up the plates and nodded at the champagne glasses.
“Probably,” Tilda said with a smile as they sat at the small table beside the windows. “Were you married?”
“No,” Sheba said. There wasn’t a hint of regret or explanation in her voice. Just a simple statement of fact. ”Some people say that I gave up my art career in order to be with my son, but I never gave up art. It was just the two of us, and we took care of each other. He won a scholarship to a ballet school when he was sixteen and moved away from home. It was hard for me because I loved him, but it was what he wanted.”
“It’s a long way away.”
“Based on your accent, you’re a long way from your people, too.”
“I am,” Tilda said. “Tell me what you thought of the opening.”
Sheba’s conversation rambled through chats with people she’d known back in the seventies and eighties and touched on new connections made with students who knew only digital work, and carried them through the meal. For an outsider in the art world, she harbored very few resentments, not wasting her time with crowing over her staggering financial success or the critics’ accolades. She simply reveled in being back in the thick of things. All in all, it was a very satisfying connection made, Tilda thought.
Sheba dusted cookie crumbs from her fingers, then crumpled her napkin to the center of her plate. “Let me show you the pieces I have ready,” she said, tilting her head at an uneven stack in the corner under the window.
Tilda left her purse by the table, lifted the pile of pages, and set them on the worktable. She carefully looked at each one before setting it aside, once again struck by the seemingly random placement of objects, text, and color. While she studied the new material, she watched Sheba select a large sheet of thick paper from the random pile. Materials were fixed to the page, stiffening it, a pastel of a cherry tree in full blossom at the top. Sheba selected a knife from a haphazard stash and scraped away the neat edges of the pastel, turning clean edges jagged, revealing a midnight blue underneath. White text appeared as the edge spread. A Broadway show, Tilda thought. The font was popular in the seventies.
“The question I was asked most frequently was why you were doing this.”
A smile danced across Sheba’s face. “Students started showing up, wanting to do research papers on my work, wondering what happened to the great Bathsheba Clark. Their words, not mine. Like I’d died already, because no one wanted my art anymore. I didn’t want people like that brooding over my paintings and sketchbooks and journals, trying to make sense of my life. My life! I’ve seen too many friends die and lose control of their estate, their history, afterward. I lived through the AIDS epidemic in the eighties, when it ravaged the artistic community. I’ve thought a great deal about what I want left behind when I die. I’m taking it apart, on my terms. Leaving nothing but the mystery.”
Tilda again felt like she’d stumbled into the very antithesis of who she was and what she did. No clean lines or order here, just a purposeful deconstruction of an artistic life. “We should talk about prices. After that opening, we’ll be able to add a zero to most items.”
Sheba batted her hand dismissively. “You work that out with the gallery owner. I’m tempted to give them away in the park.”
“How very Banksy of you. He charged sixty dollars a canvas.”
“Seems about right to me,” Sheba said.
She could add several zeroes to that price and still not run off buyers. “I’ll take the lot,” Tilda replied. “I’ll talk to Edith; we’ll divide the pages between her gallery and my shop while she works on the frames. Let me help you clean up.” They washed the dishes together, then Tilda wiped down the counters and swept the floor. “Do you have someone who looks in on you?” she asked, eyeing the state of the kitchen.
“More in the last few days than ever before.”
“I meant someone who helps you,” she said gently. “Someone who cleans and keeps you in food so you can work.”
“I can take care of myself,” Sheba said.
“Of course, but . . .” She stopped, trying not to think about Nan, alone and growing old in her tiny cottage in Cornwall. “May I stop by anyway?”
“I’d like that,” Sheba said. “You’re a good listener. You pay attention. You study people. Why?”
“Pardon?”
“Most people can’t be bothered with other folks. They want to talk about themselves, and you make it easy for them to do that. People want to tell you things. They think you can help them.”
Tilda blinked at this dead to rights assessment of who she was and what she did. “I like hearing their stories. Sometimes, I can help them.”
“Who hears your stories?”
Oddly enough, Daniel had asked her the very same thing, but in a different way. Tilda busied herself wrapping the palimpsests in several layers of plastic for the trip back to West Village Stationery. “There’s not much to tell, not compared to your beautiful work.”
“Everyone has a story,” Sheba said.
Tilda looked up from the Bubble Wrap.
“Not everyone has the tools to tell it,” Sheba added.
“I write letters,” she said, surprising herself. “As long as you keep telling yours, we’ll both be happy,” Tilda said. “I’ll see you in a few days, and I’ll call before I come to see if you need anything in particular.”
—
She took a cab back to the shop, where Penny was waiting with a giant golf umbrella. She covered the precious bag, not Tilda, on the dash to the shop’s front door.
“I’m soaked,” Tilda complained. She hadn’t bothered to open her own umbrella.
“You’ll dry out,” Penny said unsympathetically. She left the umbrella in the stand by the door, dried her hands on her skirt, then began unwrapping the palimpsests. She made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a squeal, her hands flapping as she looked at the stash.
“You remind me of a dragon hyperventilating over his gold,” Tilda said.
“If I could put these in a cave—a climate-controlled cave—and brood over them, I would. Oh my God. That’s the corner of Houston and Avenue A. That’s the Lower East Side series. I can’t believe . . . What’s this underneath? Is that a canvas? Poppies? She never did poppies. Is this unfinished work or—?” She ran her hands over her hair, visibly calming herself. “I would breathe fire at anyone who came in their vicinity. I would slay dragons to protect these.”
“Sheba feels precisely the opposite,” Tilda said, and leaned back against the desk.
“She does?”
“She started making these when art students wanted to talk to the formerly famous Bathsheba Clark.”
“Formerly famous and currently the darling of the New York art scene,” Penny said. “Famous for her most private work, her journals, a place to make mistakes and explore ideas where no one else sees them. She’s making them public, but controlling the medium, and the message. She’s pollinating the next generation of artists and opening herself up for everyone to see. Mistakes, miscues, wrong turns, the inspiration, they’d all be in those journals, but she controls how they appear. It’s incredibly brave, and incredibly obstructive at the same time. She’s revealing herself to the world, and yet hiding everything.”
“Why is it so interesting to you?”
Penny thought about it for a minute. “It’s not so much the art. It’s her life. That’s what I covet about these books, that’s what I want. How does she see the world, and how does it become what she paints?”
“You want to know how to live a life.”
“I guess so. A life like hers. Or yours.”
“Mine?” Tilda said in disbelief.
“Yours.” She looked around the shop, and in her expression Tilda knew Penny’s deepest fear, her deepest longing. It was a very familiar one, the kid outside the candy shop, the loner outside the clique, the person who thought she couldn’t have the things other people have. It was Sheba in the art world that rejected her, the powerful man with a very unique set of sexual desires fulfilled by a dancer he could break in two with one hand, Penny inside Tilda’s gleaming hardwood and steel and glass shop stocked with the finest paper goods on the market.
Oh yes, she knew it well, living on the outside, looking for acceptance, belonging, being something so brilliant it couldn’t be ignored, or forgotten, or left behind. That’s why she did what she did. No one should ever be excluded. Everyone belonged on the inside.
“I could have taken an art designer job for Bergdorf or Nordstrom,” Penny said. “I came to work with you because I think you’re going to do amazing things, and I want to be a part of something from the ground up.”
“Thank you,” Tilda said, genuinely touched. “But I don’t know how I do it. I meet people who introduce me to other people. For every party I go to where someone says, ‘You should talk to Bathsheba Clark,’ I go to dozens that are just a swirl of faces and names.”