Circles of Confusion

  In the fading light, the five pink granite stories of the American Museum of Natural History seemed all towers and turrets, a fairytale castle. With only an hour or so until closing time, people were beginning to stream out, laughing and talking. Claire felt like a salmon swimming upstream as she made her way to the entrance. Like the Met, the main hall was a marble-floored, monumental soaring space, only this one featured an exhibit of a long-necked dinosaur mother, complete with a smaller version of herself that was still large enough to make Claire feel tiny and insignificant. She craned her neck back, back, back to look at the towering mother barosaurus—like a giraffe, only with a tail nearly as long as its neck—which dwarfed the chamber's Corinthian columns.

  She checked her bags except for her backpack, hoping that she might be able to surreptitiously eat another PowerBar while viewing the exhibits. There clearly wasn't enough time to see more than a single section, so she randomly selected the Ackley Hall of African Mammals. When she entered the hall, Claire took an involuntary step back. A battle-scarred bull elephant challenged her with ears extended, trunk probing the air. He stood in the center of the hall on an elevated platform, and behind him was clustered a herd of excited elephants, all shown in full alarm. A young bull had wheeled around to protect the rear of the herd. The elephants were life-size, and so lifelike that Claire could almost hear them trumpeting, feel the ground shake beneath her feet.

  She was admiring the meticulously re-created texture of their skin when she belatedly realized that the elephants weren't just life- size, but were taken from life. They were stuffed, a tribute to the art of taxidermy and a time when people felt justified in killing something, no matter how magnificent, in order to show it to someone else. For the first time in two days Claire thought of Roland, her boss at the License Plate Division. With his penchant for elephants, he would probably love this display.

  All around the elephants, embedded in walls of dark polished marble, dioramas beckoned. In the darkened hall, each stood out in a blaze of internal sunshine. The dioramas were like windows into other worlds, other times. They reminded Claire of an old movie she had seen on TV about a scientist who had invented a time machine. Through its porthole he could examine the time and place in which he had landed before deciding to disembark.

  The nearest diorama showed a family of mountain gorillas foraging for food. The dominant male stood erect, beating his chest, while an infant and several other gorillas sat munching leaves. Sheathed in moss, a massive tree trunk lay rotting in the center of the scene.

  As she peered at one diorama and then the next, Claire realized she was totally alone. Since it was so close to closing time, she supposed whatever visitors remained were upstairs gawking at the dinosaur bones. There wasn't a guard in sight, but then again, there was no need for a guard when the dioramas were covered by plate glass. She looked around, then took a vanilla PowerBar from her backpack. Without much success, she tried to manage a discreet nibble, but the PowerBar's taffy-like texture demanded an energetic bite.

  Still chewing, Claire moved to the next diorama, half filled with what looked like real sand. The blazing artificial sun cast just enough light into the dim hallway to allow her to read the small print of the guide she had picked up at the museum's entrance. According to it, the dioramas were also called habitat groups, and the idea was to show plants and animals in their native habitat against a realistically painted background. Plants, flowers, rocks, dirt and trees—down to the bark, broken twigs and leaves—had been duplicated or, in some cases, shipped wholesale from Africa. The results were works of art.

  As she walked through empty branching hallways that smelled faintly of mothballs, Claire was accompanied by the sound of her own footsteps. She moved from diorama to diorama, one showing broad grasslands at high noon, the next a deep jungle dripping with rain, a third a harsh desert at sunset.

  She was wondering how the curators had created the strings of glistening saliva that hung from a hyena's mouth when the faint sound of another set of footsteps startled her. She turned her head, but the hall branched in such a way that she could see only a few feet in any direction. The sound seemed to have stopped. Claire began to move forward again, but she found it hard to pay attention to the exhibits. Was it her imagination, or did she hear a faint echo of footsteps joining hers? The dimness no longer seemed just a clever way of drawing attention to the exhibits. Instead it took on a sinister cast.

  She abandoned the dioramas completely and began to hunt for an exit sign. The darkened halls had made so many twists and turns that she was no longer sure where she was in relationship to the rest of the building. The one thing that was clear was that there were footsteps following her. Claire whirled around and caught a glimpse of a man in the room she had just left. He wore a raincoat and had the bill of a baseball cap pulled over his eyes, and the way he moved made her think he was young and agile.

  It was impossible to see clearly in the dim hallway, but every time she looked behind her—and she couldn't help glancing back every few seconds—he was making no pretense of looking at the exhibits. At the same time, she wasn't completely sure he was following her, since he didn't seem to be coming any closer. She could see nothing of his shadowed face, but the third or fourth time she turned around she caught the flash of the whites of his eyes as he stared directly at her.

  Claire thought of Charlie's warnings about New York. Never count your money in a public place. Don't get in a gypsy cab (which had turned out to be an unlicensed cab instead of a cab driven by a fortuneteller). Never engage in a game of chance on the street. And, most important, don't allow yourself to be alone in a dark and isolated spot with a stranger. The last one had really been a warning about strolling the streets of Manhattan at night, but to Claire the darkened recesses of the American Museum of Natural History were beginning to feel equally dangerous.

  The hallway branched and turned, and she chose paths without pausing to think, hoping to lose him in the maze, or to come upon a guard or at least an exit. She wondered what would happen if she screamed.

  Finally, the welcome green glow of an exit sign lit the far end of a chamber. She turned. The man was closer than he had been, but still absolutely silent. Claire gave up all pretense of not being frightened and began to run. Next to her was a rolling barricade of canvas and wood pretending unsuccessfully to be a wall. As she passed it, she grabbed one end, swung it around and pushed it back as hard as she could. She heard the man give a little grunt of surprise, but she was too afraid to look behind her to see if it had really hit him.

  With a final burst of effort, Claire ran out of the hall and nearly into the arms of a plump guard who was watching the last of the departing visitors.

  "Whoa, little lady!"

  "Someone was chasing me!" She tried to catch her breath.

  "Someone was what?" he said, not even bothering to turn to the door she had just run out of. Claire looked behind her, but the door had closed and didn't open again.

  "A man was just chasing me in the Hall of African Mammals."

  He gave the sigh of the continually put-upon. "I'll go take a look."

  Claire hovered at the exit, not daring to follow. But when the guard reappeared five minutes later, he said, "There's no one there, ma'am."

  "It was a man in a raincoat with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. He must have left by another way."

  "Could be. But I didn't see anyone. Maybe it was just another visitor in a hurry. It is closing time now, you know." He looked pointedly at his watch.

  "He was following me."

  "I'll put a note in my report." By the tone of his voice, Claire knew he would do no such thing.

  She retrieved her packages from the coat room and then followed on the heels of a family of five out to the sidewalk. It was full dark. She certainly didn't feel safe waiting for a bus, especially encumbered as she was. The father of the family stepped to the curb, raised his arm the way she had seen on a thousand movies and TV shows, and j
ust like on screen, a yellow cab pulled up immediately. Claire followed suit while she still felt brave. As her taxi was pulling away, she turned back in time to see the silhouette of a man wearing a baseball cap emerge from the museum. He was scanning the street, but he didn't seem to see her.

  Chapter 18Claire woke up in a big bed with white sheets, momentarily confused by the anonymity of her surroundings. In the cool morning light, her fears of being followed the night before seemed groundless, the product of an overstimulated imagination. Just as the guard had suggested, the man in the baseball cap must have simply been a last-minute visitor, hurrying, as she had been, to finish viewing the exhibit before the museum closed for the night. He had probably seen her walking faster and faster and felt spurred on by her speed. By the time she had finished getting dressed, Claire had molded the incident into an amusing story she could tell Lori or Charlie when she got home.

  She looked out the window. New York City didn't seem to have as much weather as Portland did, but the day looked promising. When she craned her head back she could just see a sliver of washed blue sky. Tonight she would be going out with Troy Nowell of Avery's auction house, but today she hoped to cram in a few more of the sights. In two more days she had to go home. It was hard to believe she had dreaded coming here.

  Claire took a bus as far as she could to Manhattan's tip, then walked to Battery Park. A beggar at a subway entrance stood up to hold his Big Gulp cup in front of her face. "It's money time!" He shook the coins on the bottom to remind her of what he meant. "It's money time now!" She averted her eyes and detoured around him without speaking, relieved when she heard him start in on the person behind her.

  Her breakfast was a stale pastry and weak coffee in a blue and white paper cup while she waited in line for the next ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Pigeons pecked at every crumb that fell. Three black teenagers performed a tumbling routine for the waiting crowd, and when one of them passed the hat, Claire contributed a dollar.

  She managed to snag a seat on the top deck of the ferry. As it slowly chugged away from the city, she thrilled at the sight of the gloriously crowded Manhattan skyline punctuated by the narrow twin towers of the World Trade Center. All around her video cameras whirred.

  She elected not to climb the Statue of Liberty and instead continued on to Ellis Island. The glass display cases were filled with the artifacts immigrants had carefully selected to bring to the new country—wooden toys, Bibles, jewelry, lace petticoats, clocks, snuffboxes, ivory carvings, swords, tortoiseshell hair ornaments, wedding dresses and silver spoons. And photos, always photos, of the old country and the people left behind. The display that moved Claire the most was a preserved fragment of wall covered with layers of graffiti in three dozen different languages. The accompanying text explained that people had come to Ellis Island from all over the world, only to find themselves spending hours or days waiting in lines, or even weeks in quarantine. A potter's field on the island held the graves of those who had died within view of their hearts' desire.

  Claire's knowledge of her own family history was limited, extending only about as far back as Grandma Montrose. According to her mother, they were "Heinz 57," without enough of any one type of blood in their veins to have inherited traditional foods, costumes or holidays. The one person who might have been able to tell her more about her past, Claire realized, was Aunt Cady.

  It was early afternoon when she returned to the city. She walked among the bustling gray suits on Wall Street and past the pillars of the Stock Exchange, familiar from a thousand photographs. She ate a late lunch at a Tex-Mex restaurant, where she had a pork chop, fried okra and the best milk gravy and mashed potatoes she had ever tasted. Afterward, she lost herself on the narrow winding streets of Greenwich Village, window-shopping stores that sold bizarre clothing no one in Portland would ever wear. The art galleries were also from another planet, many displaying items that didn't seem to Claire to be art at all, like a blackboard that had a sentence written on it in chalk, "Fair wind follows the sailor," or another gallery that featured a half-dozen pig embryos floating in a brine-filled aquarium. Three hundred and fifty years from now, would someone still regard these as art, the way Claire looked at her painting now and still thought it beautiful? When she found herself on a familiar street—Fifth Avenue—she realized that the sky was nearly dark. She looked at her watch. Five o'clock. Troy was picking her up at eight-thirty. It was time to go back to her hotel and attempt to transform herself into the type of woman who would not look out of place at Cri du Coeur.

  "You look stunning."

  "Thank you." Standing in the hotel lobby, Claire examined Troy's face and decided that he meant it. Before his arrival, while people dressed in sneakers and jeans eddied around her, she had felt as out of place as a yellow fantail among goldfish. Now she had become part of a matching set. Troy was dressed in another dark, elegantly cut suit, this one with a faint chalk stripe. He took her arm and the crowd of tourists parted before them. She heard them whispering to each other, hazarding names from the gossip columns. As they stepped into the night, Claire glimpsed her reflection in the lobby doors. With her hair caught up into a mass of ringlets, eyes enhanced by eyeliner and mascara, and of course the camouflage of the dress, she looked nothing like herself. Once again she thought of Cinderella.

  Her carriage turned out to be a long black limousine, idling at the curb. A uniformed driver leaned against it, wearing a black cap on his short-cropped orange hair. He held the door as Troy handed her inside and then slid next to her on the leather seat. A fine tremble washed over her as the driver got inside.

  "Are you cold? I'll ask John to turn up the heat."

  Troy leaned forward to tap on the glass, but Claire laid a hand on his arm. "I'm not cold. Just a little nervous."

  "Nervous? Why?" His eyes were guileless, as if he really didn't see the incongruity of them sitting side by side.

  "This isn't the kind of thing I normally wear." She fingered the slippery fabric of the dress. 'And this isn't the kind of car I normally ride in. If I were at home right now, I would just be finishing work." The state's list of vulgar words, her REJECTED stamp, the day's highlight the peanut butter cup cajoled from the secretary's secret stash—all that seemed to belong to someone else. Outside her tinted window, the muffled world slid by. "My job's so boring. Your work is much more glamorous."

  Troy snorted. "Glamorous? All day, every day, I deal with people who treat me with much less respect than they would a waiter. If your family name didn't appear on Mrs. Astor's List of the Four Hundred, or if you can't lay claim to a relative who's a prince or at least a baron, then you simply don't matter to them." In the enfolding darkness of the car, Claire heard the edge of bitterness in his voice. "They'll come into Avery's with something beautiful—or half a dozen somethings—but they have no appreciation for what they have. They want to get rid of a Tintoretto because it no longer matches their loveseat. Or they need a little cash because they've overspent again, so they bring in an ancestral portrait that's been in their family for three hundred years and hope it will fetch a few hundred thousand. Or they gather up everything they have on their walls, from Old Masters to paintings of big-eyed children, and haul it all in. It s all the same to them—a piece of canvas held in a frame."

  "I can see where that would be really frustrating," Claire agreed, thinking Troy’s frustrations still sounded glamorous. The limousine pulled up outside the restaurant and Claire waited for someone to open her door as if she had been born to this life.

  Everything in Cri du Coeur was white and gold—from the starched white damask tablecloths to the gold-armed chandeliers ending in frosted white glass tulips. Claire was relieved to see that her dress, which had looked so over the top in the hotel lobby, fit right in here. With sidelong glances, Claire appraised the women they passed as the maitre d' escorted them to their table. One woman wore a dark suit with a fluidly draped jacket and a skirt briefer than Claire's running shorts. Anothe
r woman sported black leather pants topped with a jacket made of curly white fake fur. A third with cropped red hair wore a floor-length electric blue dress, complete with a small train that she had looped over the back of her chair.

  In the center of the room was a table that held a group of laughing people, including an actor famous for his rugged face and turquoise blue eyes. Claire was shocked when he gave her a quick once-over and a smile! It was as if she had stepped onto a movie set or into a particularly vivid dream. She was so befuddled that she didn't notice the maitre d' pulling out her chair and sat down instead in the one opposite. Troy slid into the offered chair as smoothly as if he had expected it. Claire blushed, hoping no one had seen her faux pas. The nearest person, a woman in a green jacket with straight black hair cut in a way that made Claire think of Cleopatra, was completely absorbed in her own conversation.

  Troy slid the menu from her hands. "I'll order for us both, if you'd like." What Claire had glimpsed of the prices, even in elaborate calligraphy, had seemed outrageous. A cup of coffee was eleven dollars! For that you should get lifetime refills.

  Despite its name, Cri du Coeur didn't serve purely French food, but a range of items that spanned the globe. For starters, they shared a plate of a half-dozen Cajun-style oysters, accompanied by a bottle of white wine. The flavors of sea and spice unfurled in Claire's mouth.

  "I've been thinking about your painting," Troy said as he refilled her glass. "Clearly it's a forgery, but who really painted it?"

  After her afternoon with Dante, Claire felt on firmer ground challenging Troy's opinion. "How could you tell right away that it was a forgery?"

  "I knew it from the second you peeled back that—what was that, anyway? Bubble wrap? There are two ways to uncover a forgery. One's scientific. If I were a scientist, I could put your painting under, say, an optical emission spectrograph pigment analyzer, and I'm sure the results would allow me to be able to point to a graph and tell you that your painting couldn't have been painted by Vermeer. But the other way, the way I'm paid to use, is the product of a trained eye. Or maybe it's in the gut. I actually felt nauseous when I first saw your painting."