Will has given me art.
Chapter Ten
A handwritten thank-you card seems old-fashioned and intimate and therefore an appropriate response to Will’s gift, but I settle for an email instead. Making my reply casual yet polite, pixels and bytes instead of the intimacy of my fingers clutching a pen and moving it along paper. Without leaving an indelible mark, something permanent in the world.
His response pings my in-box only a minute or so after I’ve sent the message, and though my heart leaps at the sight of his name, I don’t open it right away. I minimize the email window and concentrate on researching a specific fabric Naveen wants for the gallery. Gauzy, pale yellow, embroidered here and there with red and orange roses. Green vines. He wants it for one of the back rooms he plans to rent out for parties, to hide the unfinished beams. It’s hard to find it by the bolt, and though I’ve come up with several alternatives, he’s insistent on this particular one.
Other than business, Naveen hasn’t spoken to me since the day in his office. It’s been a week. He’s waiting for me to come to him, to apologize, and I haven’t yet been able to make myself do it.
Finally, when I’ve checked off five of the ten tasks I’d planned for the morning, I give myself permission to look at Will’s message.
You’re welcome. There wasn’t anyone else I could think of who’d appreciate it more.
My fingers type. I could stop myself, but I don’t want to. You shouldn’t have. It wasn’t necessary.
His response is almost immediate. I wanted you to have it.
I have no reply for that but another thank-you, and that should be the end of it. But another message comes through in a few minutes. It’s an invitation to a gallery show, not Naveen’s, in two days. Will’s listed as one of the artists.
I don’t answer, but I don’t delete it, either. The message should get lost in my in-box, but every time I look it’s still there as bold and bright as a neon sign. The next message comes in a few minutes before I’m getting ready to leave for the day.
Please come.
To this I have no ready response except the leap of my heart, the pulse and throb of my blood in soft and tender places. My fingers move, typing a reply I’d never be able to voice aloud.
I’ll be there.
Chapter Eleven
Unlike Naveen’s, this gallery features only photography, mostly in black-and-white, prints of all sizes framed in identical glass bricks and staggered around a room with black walls. The door frames and windowsills are painted red, and the lighting is harsh and bright. I like it better than the gauzy fabric and fairy lighting of Naveen’s gallery, though I’d never tell him so. Even if he ever does start talking to me again.
I see Will’s work right away. Among the other shots of buildings and trees, all the same subject matter, his still stand out to me. I study the photos, remembering the way his hands hold a camera.
I don’t have to turn around to know he’s there.
We stand shoulder to shoulder, not enough distance between us to make this casual. My dress is sleeveless, and his denim jacket brushes my skin. I don’t look at him.
“I like that one.” I point out a framed series of three nearly identical shots, different only in their distance from the subject.
Will doesn’t answer. I shift a little away from him to look at the next piece, a black-and-white shot of what looks like bamboo. There’s nothing at all special about that one, and I tell him so.
Finally, he laughs. From the corner of my eye, I see him hang his head. He shrugs, glancing at me sideways.
“Yeah. I know. I only had them put it up here because I was missing a piece.”
“What happened to the one you were going to show?”
We turn toward each other at the same instant, eyes meeting. The hem of my dress swirls around my shins, and I imagine the whisper of it against his jeans. It sounds like roses smell.
“I gave it away,” Will says.
“Take me somewhere” is what I say back, and though I’m convinced he will smile and shake his head, change the subject, refuse....
He doesn’t.
Chapter Twelve
Another diner, more coffee. We both order pie—he likes pecan. I pick cherry. We walked the few blocks from the gallery, and we talked about the weather.
It might be April outside, but in here it’s February. I warm my hands on the mug the waitress has filled with hot liquid. “Can I have a couple—”
Will’s already pushing two sugar packets across the table toward me. He watches me tear the paper and pour sugar into the coffee. Before I even lift the mug to my mouth, he hands me one more packet. It makes the coffee tolerable at last.
“Thanks for coming to the show.”
“I barely stayed long enough for it to count,” I say.
“But you came.”
I study him. The brush of his sandy hair over his forehead, tufting in front of his ears. The bristle of stubble around his mouth, not quite a goatee. Dark circles press the flesh below his eyes, a little more prominent on the right than the left. He looks tired.
I wait until he looks at me. “What are you doing?”
He could make any kind of answer. Eating pie. Drinking coffee. Talking about the weather.
“I don’t know,” Will says. “Whatever it is, I shouldn’t be.”
“No. You probably shouldn’t. But I could’ve just said no.”
He smiles. “You could’ve.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No. I didn’t.”
Again, we’re staring at each other across a table, but this time it feels better. Not quite so awkward, and definitely far more ripe with promise. When he looks at me with that sideways grin, I don’t return it. I’m trying to be good.
“You wanna get out of here?” Will gives the diner a roundabout look as he hunches his shoulders, lowers his voice, as if he’s trying to keep our escape a secret.
I look around, too. We’re nearly the only customers in here. I’m the one who asked him to take me somewhere, but I’m not so eager now to let him do it.
“Where do you want to go?”
He shrugs. “It’s New York City. You think we can’t find something to do?”
I make a show of looking at the clock, but the truth is, Ross is out of town again, and even if he wasn’t, the night is too young for me to have to excuse myself with the lateness of the hour. “You don’t want to just sit here and drink shitty coffee?”
“The coffee I could deal with. The pie is crap, too.” Will grins.
Slowly I return the smile, reluctant only because I don’t want to seem too eager. I stab my pie with my fork, leaving it standing upright in the pool of cherries that spreads like blood across the stained porcelain plate. “Sure. Let’s go.”
Outside, we walk in silence at first, having already exhausted the weather as our topic of conversation. New York is never dark, of course, but it does look different at night, painted in the white and yellow of streetlights. In this neighborhood tall brownstones tower over us, most of their windows alight with gold.
“I like to look in windows,” I admit, slowing as we pass one particularly pretty house. Some of the others have been made into apartments, but this one is still a single residence. You can tell because of the matching window boxes and the glimpses of furnishings in bedrooms on the second and third floors. There are bars on the windows, but I can still see what looks like a nursery complete with blue-painted walls and— “Oh, look! Stars!”
Will pauses to stare upward, across the narrow, one-way street. “Where?”
“In there.” I point toward the house, the window of the nursery lined with twinkling white lights. I realize, too late, the stars I saw were from the lights and not anything he might be able to
see. “Oh. Never mind.”
He tilts his head, curious. “On the wall? Painted?”
“No. I meant the lights. But they’re not...” I gesture as we start walking again. “You won’t see them as stars.”
Will turns to walk backward, staring at the building as we pass. “But you did?”
“Yes,” I say after a second. “When I look at Christmas lights like that...those twinkly kind, I see stars.”
“Like in Naveen’s gallery?”
There the lights are hung in zigzags across the ceiling above the layers of gauzy fabric. They’re meant to simulate stars. But that’s not what I see. I see actual stars, a halo of light with six points.
“Not exactly.”
I don’t mean to tell him any more than that—it’s not as weird as saying that voices and certain words have scent and flavor and color. But it’s still pretty bizarre and something I’ve shared with only a few people. Trusted friends. My family. Never a casual acquaintance, not on purpose, though there’ve been a few times when something has slipped out.
“They’re real stars,” I blurt. “Not like the ones in the sky. It’s hard to explain. They sort of...float around the lights. Like...have you ever seen those novelty glasses, the cardboard ones. Kind of like 3-D glasses? When you look through them at the lights, you see a halo sort of thing.”
“Like snowmen,” he says, catching on. “Or Stars of David.”
He gets it. Sort of. It’s still too hard to explain. “Yes. Like that.”
“Huh.” He studies me. “That’s kind of cool. Hey. Have you been to Madame Tussauds?”
I laugh, surprised by the question. “Um...no. I haven’t, actually.”
“We should go.”
“We should?”
Will nods. How can I resist? I’ve never been to the famous wax museum, though I’ve heard all about it. He leads the way, down one street and another. We find other subjects than the weather. Nothing important, nothing serious. We carefully don’t touch for longer than a second or two, not even when he takes my elbow as we cross a busy street. I like how he leads me, almost herding, to make sure I make it across safely.
Madame Tussauds is close to Times Square, down Forty-Second Street. A giant hand creeps up the outside of the building, holding strings as though for a marionette. Inside, red velvet ropes signify a significant queue, but fortunately at this time of night, there’s no line. We head up in an elevator and come out in a large room set up like a Hollywood party.
The figures are amazing. Detailed, realistic. Creepy. I think about posing for a picture with some of my favorites, but can’t think of how I’d explain the photos to anyone without having to make up a complicated story. We don’t have much time to begin with, and every passing second flies by even faster because I’m having so much fun, laughing and pretending to chat with these frozen wax figures. Laughing at Will’s jokes and his impressions—he’s got a few very good ones, though his impression of Stephen Hawking has me snort-laughing, and I shake my head in mock disapproval.
We wind our way through displays and then through the “scary” part of the museum—Hollywood monsters and serial killers, but it’s also the part that leads into the history of Madame Tussaud herself. She got her start making death masks during the French Revolution, according to the information set up all over the place. Turning a corner, we spy a particularly gruesome pile of corpses, with a mural of the Eiffel Tower in the background. It’s dark in here, and very quiet but for the soft sound of Will’s breathing.
“Elisabeth.”
“Yes, Will.” His name crunches, the taste of sand and sea.
“About what I said the other day. It was kind of shitty. I’m sorry.”
“I told you not to be,” I say. “And besides. You were absolutely right. I should absolutely not have done it.”
Will scuffs the floor with his toe. “You didn’t do it alone.”
We’re standing in the middle of a room with black-painted walls, the eerie sound of screams piped in from hidden speakers, and gore-spattered wax bodies all around us. This isn’t the time or place for this discussion, even if I wanted to have it, which I don’t.
“I just don’t want you to think—” he starts.
I shake my head. “I don’t.”
We’re standing close enough to kiss, if only he’d lean forward. I have no idea what I’ll do if he tries.
“Well,” I say, when it’s apparent he’s neither going to lean or kiss. “We’ll always have Paris.”
The night air’s gone much cooler when we leave the wax museum. Hint of rain in the air, the far-off rumble of thunder. Neither of us talks about ending the night. Instead, we walk.
New York City is enormous, but it’s easy to forget that when the buildings rise so high they block out everything but what’s right in front of you. We’ve meandered through Times Square and the flood of tourists still gaping at the neon lights, even though by now it’s getting close to midnight. I know where we are, but not where we’re going. I’m trusting Will to lead me, and he does.
We round a corner, and although it had to have been there all the while, I’m surprised to see the Empire State Building, alight with red, white and blue, towering over us. I must’ve made some sort of exclamation, because Will looks at me. He tips his head that way.
“You wanna go up?”
“It’s late.” The truth, not an excuse.
He smiles. “It’s open late. And besides, the view at night is the best. It’s never as crowded.”
“Do you go to the top a lot?” I ask as we head toward the ornate art deco doors to what had once been the tallest building in New York City.
Will holds the door for me. “No. Not a lot.”
Inside, more queues, also amazingly empty. Will insists on paying for the VIP package, which puts us to the front of the line and gives us access to the 102nd floor instead of just the 86th. Uniformed employees guide us to the elevators, where we go up, and up and up.
Outside on the observation deck, it’s more than cool, it’s chilly. The wind whips at my skirt and my hair. Goose bumps rise on my bare arms, and I rub them briskly, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
The view is amazing.
In every direction the lights spread out for miles, bright as day in the city proper and getting sparser and more scattered farther away. The Hudson River gleams, a black satin ribbon dotted with the pearls of boats bobbing on the water. Brake lights and traffic lights, rubies and emeralds, are set in the gold of streetlamps. Down below there might be the stench of urine and cacophony of traffic, but up here so far above the ground, New York City is a jewel box, the treasures inside tumbled out for everyone to see.
Another distant rumble of thunder has me searching the skyline for lightning. This wouldn’t be the best place to stand during a storm, but so far the only flashes I see are far away. Probably in New Jersey. The wind’s picked up, though. A storm is coming.
Will shrugs out of his jacket and offers it to me. “Here. You’re shivering.”
“I can’t. Then you’ll be cold.”
“I’ll be okay.” He drapes the denim around my shoulders and rubs my upper arms for a second.
His touch warms me, but it has nothing to do with the jacket. I pull it closer around me, thinking I should try harder to refuse, but I’m too cold. “Thanks.”
We view all four sides of the observation deck and have no more reason to stay. As we get back to street level, the first few frigid, spattering drops of rain have begun to fall. The overhang shields us, but we can’t stand there for long. The doorman’s already giving us the stink eye. Will dances a little from foot to foot, his hands shoved deep into his pockets and his shirt slowly getting dark with the spray that’s started to go slantwise.
“We could go someplace else?” he sugg
ests.
I shake my head. “Where? It’s late, and it’s raining....”
“We could go to my place. It’s not far.”
“I don’t think that would be a great idea,” I force myself to say, although it’s exactly the opposite of what I want to answer.
I can’t quite read his expression. “Because you don’t trust me?”
It’s not him I don’t trust, oh, hell no. I’m the one who’d cross the line again. As hard and fast as I could.
“If I don’t go to your apartment,” I tell him carefully, neutrally, aware of the doorman listening to this exchange as if he’s got front seats to a Broadway show, “I don’t have to trust you.”
Thunder booms, making us both jump. We have no place else to walk, not in this weather. And besides, I have a train to catch.
“I’ll just be able to make it,” I tell him. “Catch the last one.”
“Let’s share a cab. It can drop me off first, then you, okay?”
It will give me a few more minutes with him, and that’s really what I want. Will, proficient New Yorker that he is, hails a cab with a whistle that makes me laugh. I’ve never been good at that. He opens the door for me and waits for me to slide in across the cracked vinyl seat that catches my skirt and tugs it up too high on my legs. There’s plenty of room in the backseat of that cab, but I don’t move over more than halfway. He gives the driver directions and leans against the back of the seat.
Our knees bump every time the cab goes over a rough patch in the street. That’s a lot. I look carefully out the opposite window so I’m not looking at Will; if he’s looking at me, I don’t know it. I breathe in. I breathe out. We are sealed in these last few moments, neither of us speaking, but both of us, I think, fully aware of the other.